Belfast PrintWorkshop: Celebrating 35 Years of Prints
Highpoint will showcase work by 30 artists affiliated with the Belfast Print Workshop. Now elegantly revitalized, Northern Ireland's once-troubled capital is home to a lively artist community whose print practitioners congregate at the 10-year-old BPW. Members collaborate with poets and other artists and turn out realistic to abstract work in myriad techniques: etching, screen printing, collograph, photo intaglio, lithography, monoprints, linocuts, aquatint and giclee, a controversial contemporary medium that purists dismiss as photographic reproduction rather than true hand-printing. Expect samples across the board. Free opening reception, 6:30-9 p.m. Fri 8/26. --Mary Abbe
'Nay-Say: Paintings and Other Things'
Throw two very different artists in the same studio together for four years and things are bound to get interesting. J. Wasyk and Louis LaPierre both explore issues of environment and space in their work, though their results couldn't be more different. LaPierre's work depicts gritty, contemporary wastelands, while Wasyk's drips with color and abstract figures. An opening reception will include live music by Austin Dufaux and Hot Ribs, plus video work by DuPierre LaFaux, and a Sept. 17 closing reception will have live music by makr and brodR. Free opening reception 7 p.m.-1 a.m. Fri 8/26. --Jahna Peloquin
Three Artists: Guo Gai, Meng Tang, Slinko
In China, art that explores politics and culture has a way of getting artists in trouble. This has been the case with both Guo Gai and Meng Tang, the former of whom was imprisoned for a month in China as a result. Gai and Tang (who now resides in Minneapolis), along with New York-based sculptor Slinko, will touch on social, political and cultural issues in a new group show at the Soap Factory. Gai's series of photographs critique the corruption and emptiness he perceives in modern China, where he still lives. Tang will present a conceptual recording of five voices repeating culturally rooted phrases in five languages along with a series of sculptures. Ukraine-born Slinko explores Soviet socialism and the liberal capitalism of America via the "poetic possibilities of a physical object" in her work-in-progress, "Make-Believe." Free opening reception 7-11 p.m. Sat 8/27. --Jahna Peloquin
