20/20 Vision, Second Edition

The Art of Contemporary University Printmaking

Endi Poskovic

As a reproductive and dispersible medium, printmaking has long been connected with didacticism. For example the Nuremberg Chronicle, written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel and appearing in 1493 as an incunabulum, is one of the bestdocumented, early printed books. In modern times, from the likes of Hogarth, Goya and Daumier, we have the effective use of captions as narrative. More recently, with commercial demand of printing and the proliferation of printed images in the late 19th-centrury, the bold graphic style and banner captions begin to characterize graphic production of the early 20th-century, particularly travel posters and political propaganda on both sides of Atlantic. Through my own visual work, I have consciously made associations with the didactic trajectory of printmaking, and the uniquely graphic way of merging the representation of image and text in one. The placement of real and invented words contributes to the situations which make the images hover between the real and the fictitious, the rational and the absurd. The hybridized narratives and memory landscapes in my work imply stories from personal and social histories, referencing themes of memory, displacement, cultural and environmental shifts, migration and alienation that are at once magnificent and dystopian. I establish these links deliberately to persuade the viewer to begin to seek a connection. The connection, on the other hand, for each viewer could be anything. The act of reading text is the act of reading the image as a whole.