Printmakers Jillian Ross and Wally Dion Collaborate at Remai Modern

×

Expand

Printer Sarah Madgin, left, and Jillian Ross, right, pull a test print for Wally Dion during the Live Editions/Jillian Ross Print residency at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Sask. (photo by Nasibeh Nasibi)

It is unlikely that many visitors to a public art gallery will find a fully functioning printmaking studio inside it, but this is what I discovered at the Remai Modern on a recent trip to Saskatoon.

Collaborative master printer Jillian Ross and studio manager Brendan Copestake of Jillian Ross Print, set up shop there in early April for Live Editions/Jillian Ross Print, an exhibition of printed art by the renowned South African artist William Kentridge and a residency that invites visitors into the studio to watch and talk with the printmakers while they work. To tell the truth, I went to Saskatoon because they were there.

They are engaged in two projects. During the first three and a half months in residence, Ross and her team worked on editioning four large complex prints by Kentridge, who to my mind is one of the most significant and inventive artists of our time. (VivianeArt handles Kentridge prints in Calgary.)

Ross is also collaborating for two intense weeks with Wally Dion, a member of Yellow Quill First Nation (Salteaux), who was born and grew up in Saskatoon and visits frequently from Binghamton, New York, where he now lives. Dion, 46, is known for constructing traditional images with contemporary materials and infusing them with new meanings. Large works that evoke aerial views of land and cities and morning star quilt patterns are made with cut-up circuit boards that are collaged or strung into quilts and tapestries; his big portraits of Indigenous women and men show them as strong, productive urban people; his transparent silk star quilts unfurl above the prairies like ethereal blankets or flags. 

×

Expand

Wally Dion inspects one of his recent silkscreen prints made in collaboration with Smokestack Studio, Hamilton, Ont.

(photo by Nasibeh Nasibi). On the wall behind him on the right is a print by William Kentridge from “The Great Yes/ The Great No” series and, on the left, test fragments for the Dion prints.

Ross is from Saskatchewan, too. She and Dion went to university together, but lost touch after she moved in 2003 to South Africa, where she lived until 2020. She has worked with Kentridge, producing brilliantly innovative prints for 17 years and continues to do so now that she is back in Saskatoon. Her reputation as a master printer precedes her: when Dion decided to make his first prints since grad school, he sought her out. 

Together artist and printer are developing an ongoing series of unique prints with a relatively new intaglio process called photopolymer gravure. Developed in 1989, it was initially used commercially for offset lithography and letterpress printing and increasingly by artists during the past 20 odd years. A variant of traditional copperplate photogravure, whose roots go back to the beginnings of photography, photopolymer gravure is known for its long range of smooth, nuanced tones. Ross has deftly employed it to give remarkable depth to the jungle-like scenes in Kentridge’s How To Explain Who I Was and Citizens, What Have They Done with All the Air I, II and III, which stem from his theatrical production The Great Yes/ The Great No (2024), and which she is editioning now.

Dion is using the same process and a similar colour palette to very different ends. His new, as yet untitled prints are based on a portrait of Rachel, a model he has used several times for painting and drawing, who wears long braids and a white satin western shirt. It is Rachel who turns her back on the viewer in Prairie Braids (2023), a pair of photopolymer gravure prints, one red, one black, which are presented side by side in rococo brass frames cast from molten bullet casings poured into the soil of a chosen site. There are two framed sets of these images, which also exist as print editions. For the set made in Saskatoon, the frame was cast on open land in the infamous “Starlight Tours” area beyond the city limits where in the 1970s, 1990s and early 2000s Saskatoon police abandoned Indigenous people, usually men, “to walk it off” in subzero temperatures. Several froze to death. 

In the new prints, Rachel faces forward. Dion has broken up her printed image physically into rectangular sections, which repeat in parts as though the image had been shaken by a strong stuttering motion. The sections are then assembled and printed on one sheet, which Dion cuts into 5.5 x 7 inch “cards.”  He can experiment with the cards at will, arranging, rearranging and cutting them into even smaller units until he finds a configuration he likes. When these are reassembled and collaged onto a full-sheet printed background, the fragments construct a portrait with a layer of meaning that goes beyond likeness to reveal an inner life. 

Rachel is shown to be a woman with heightened vision — she has multiple eyes — perhaps a sybil or oracle who can see into the future. Her braids, which signify strength, culture and spirituality, also multiply. Each new print in the series will be different in colour and the configuration of the fragments. Some will be monochromatic; others will be more than one colour. While the fragmentation might point to Cubism, Dion relates it to the distortions of digital Glitch Art and the work of the Canadian painter/illustrator Alex Garant. However, Dion has worked out how and with what means to achieve the overall effect in collaboration with Ross, who puts her master printer’s deep knowledge and technical skills at the service of artists and their ideas and intentions. 

×

Expand

Wally Dion, left, and Jillian Ross discuss different types of paper during the Live Editions/Jillian Ross Print residency at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Sask. (photo by Nasibeh Nasibi)

The dynamic between artist and printer is a give and take that enables both to learn, solve problems and achieve results they might not have anticipated at the outset. Dion described himself to me as a perfectionist who felt he might be too rigid. He wanted to try to loosen up. He went into the studio with an image he had painted 12 years earlier when he was looking for a way to bring abstraction into portraiture, as he says a “digital, photographic, photocopy type of abstraction.” He saw the prints Kentridge had constructed with fragments and Ross suggested he try it as a way to work. Dion would initially lose some control in the unfamiliar media of printmaking, which had made him hesitant at first, but he would regain it when it came to putting the fragments together as compositions. This was familiar territory.

×

1 of 2

Expand

Wally Dion, untitled, 2024, photopolymer gravure on Hahnemühle, Natural White, 300gsm, collaged with archival backing tape, 43" x 36", ed. 1/1 (photo by Nasibeh Nasibi)

×

2 of 2

Expand

Wally Dion, untitled, 2024, photopolymer gravure on Hahnemühle, Natural White, 300gsm, collaged with archival backing tape, 43" x 39", ed. 1/1 (photo by Nasibeh Nasibi)

Prev

Next

Dion makes his work in other media — acrylic portrait paintings superimposed with rectangular grids, the cut-up circuit boards collaged into paintings and assembled into pieced quilts and tapestries — in a similar way. The grid has been the ever-present substructure of his work. Collaborating with Ross, it becomes the matrix for their experimentations, which remain visible in the variations on a theme within the unique prints. The distorting abstractions of the model’s image give her a metaphysical presence and intensity.

“Rachel’s personality and life direction refers to a spiritual journey, alternate vision and awareness,” Dion says. “As does my path and the way I think on such things. But this is very true of many Indigenous people: an alternative way of seeing. I bring up vision in my art practice.” 

Inevitably, as with other artists who make prints, Dion’s experience of collaborative printmaking will feed back into his practice. It will influence other forms and materials he uses and perhaps lead to new ones. How that will happen we will have to wait to see. The word from Saskatoon is that it might have something to do with paper. ■

Live Editions/Jillian Ross Print is at the Remai Modern through Aug. 11.

Life in Print: William Kentridge and Pablo Picasso, an exhibition of Kentridge’s Universal Archive linocut series and selections from the Remai’s collection of Picasso linocuts, is on view at the Remai Modern through Dec. 29. 

Life in Print will travel to the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton in summer 2025.

Innovate/Collaborate Printmaking Gathering, a symposium organized by Remai Modern and the University of Saskatchewan, will take place September 28 and 29, 2024.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.