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ABOUT LA
SOUFFRANCE ET L'AVENTURE PRINTS
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.
Endi Poskovic
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