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Endi Poskovic: statement
about my recent work
Ideas about shared and personal history, memory and
displacement, inform my imagery. With my graphic work, I
seek to provide a readable context in which different
stories and emotions can be conveyed while
simultaneously appearing infeasible. Sentences, composed
and engraved below my images, through representation and
re-contextualization, shift the reading of imagery.
Concurrent coherence and disconnection between the text
and the images are intended to engage the viewer--the
act of reading the text, in effect, becomes an
interpretation of visual language. The connection
between the two, however, could be anything.
I am a naturalized American citizen born in Sarajevo,
Bosnia (Former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia).
Shortly before the break up of Yugoslavia in 1990, I
moved to the United States to study art, where I have
continued to maintain professional and personal
livelihood. In the US, my graphic imagery evolved into
an amalgam of hybridized narratives, memory landscapes
and treacherous situations while retaining visual
strategies of classic ukiyo-e tradition and European
political propaganda poster. My conscious decision to
make a new life in the US, particularly the Utopian
American West, a place of promise, sublime fulfillment,
and possible, even probable disappointment, has taken
the notions of memory and displacement even further.
This partly circumstantial, partly self-imposed exile,
the unexpected separation from the place of my childhood
and the deliberate choice of place to form a new life,
created a personal history experienced through slices of
time and the fractured prism of two lives, American and
European, personal and artistic, lived side by side.
This dichotomy deepens my interest in the ideas which
are simultaneously here and there, real and invented,
accessible and ambiguous.
My printmaking is a means to form a visual language as
well as a method to disseminate this language.
Hand-drawing, photographic montage and digital
applications are at the core of my thought-process. I
work primarily in relief and produce ukiyo-e prints by
hand-rubbing inked woodblocks onto paper. I cut the
blocks by hand on birch plywood and print on Kozo-washi.
I integrate between three and seven individual blocks
which print as few as eight and as many as fifteen
colors per each image. After carving the blocks, I proof
unique impressions on various washi each with slight
variations due to hand inking and choice of color. Using
small, hand-made wooden barrens, I apply pressure onto
the paper from behind, evenly transferring the ink from
the blocks. Each individual impression takes
approximately 12 to 18 hours, and most of this time is
spent on rubbing and manually transferring color inks
onto paper. Each complete set of woodblock plates
becomes a point of departure for the creation of new
color versions and the ages old tradition of making
images takes on a new life in a contemporary context.
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