Photographers and printmakers coming from countries as far away as Japan and Argentina mingled in the Art Annex of the printmaking studios Wednesday night.
Associate professor in the School of Art and Design Tracy Templeton lectured at the opening of the Light/Matter symposium. In addition to the lecture, attendees experienced an open house and reception.
The symposium will allow prominent photographers and printmakers to meet and discuss their art, while also having their work featured in an exhibition. Templeton said around 20 of the 45 artists who are featured in the exhibition are attending the symposium.
Templeton, who gave the opening lecture for the symposium, was also one of three curators for the exhibition. She said she and Walter Jule, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta in Canada and one of the other curators for the exhibit, began discussing the idea two years ago.
“There’s an entire undertone of artists that work in printmaking and we wanted to bring them together for the first time because those movements have been very separated by continent but not actually brought together until this show, ‘Light/Matter,’” Templeton said.
Jule said the histories of photography and printmaking have been intertwined since the beginning of photography reproduction. He said printmaking had already been around for 1,000 years before the two mediums joined.
“It was kind of an adversarial relationship for a long time because photography wasn’t considered art, it was just about reportage, it was just about fact gathering,” Jule said. “And the artist just wanted to protect their little realm, but the possibilities of combining photography and print making, meaning marks and spaces that we associate with print making, was inevitable.”
Though the exhibition doesn’t open until Friday at the Grunwald Gallery of Art, there are many other symposium events happening until the end of the week. Jule said that these events will include individual artists giving slide presentations on their own work, as well as panel discussions.
These events will take place in different buildings around IU’s campus, such as the Indiana Memorial Union and the Global and International Studies Building. Templeton said they tried to pick areas according to where the subject matter might resonate.
“It’s great because when you travel to these things, sometimes you go halfway around the world where everything is one conference room in one building,” Jule said.
Templeton said the criteria for the pieces featured in the exhibition were that the artist not only had to work in photography and printmaking, but also that they had to build and sustain a career on it to the present day.
Jule said many of the artists at the symposium have been following each other’s work for years or even decades, but have never met.
“So now’s a chance to come together,” he said. “It’s like jazz musicians all around the world playing together and they’ve been thinking about how it would be cool to play with Miles Davis or something, and all of a sudden, they can all come and play with Miles Davis.”
