Personal Geographies
Please join us for a reception Saturday, June 4, 2 -4 pm for “Personal Geographies”, Rosemary Cooley and Cynthia Back .
The June exhibition features the glowing reduction woodcut prints of Cynthia Back and the wide ranging artists’ books by Rosemary Cooley. The artists give us a glimpse of their worldview of travel, respect for nature, the sea and the world beyond our planet.
Rosemary Cooley joined Washington Printmakers Gallery in 2004. In this exhibition, she will exhibit solely Artists’ Books, which hold great interest for her as they are like “crossword puzzles for artists”. Filled with etchings, lithographs, monoprints, and collagraphs, each book features words from myriad sources, and which take on new meanings when juxtaposed with the images. Some books in this “Personal Geographies” exhibition originate from her life of travel, some from poetry and all from those dreamlike images which reside in our unconscious and conscious minds.
Rosemary’s work is in many collections, amongst them the Library of Congress, Georgetown University, Delbarton School, The National Headquarters of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD and private collections worldwide.
Cynthia Back focuses on landscape: water, forests, and the ways in which they are being transformed by environmental degradation. Conveying a deep attachment to the earth; it’s ever-changing pattern, color, and shape, the tension between these oppositional forces is important to her work. For this exhibition Cynthia presents a selection of reduction woodcuts of landscapes shaped by encroaching urbanization. She loves the discipline of the reduction relief printmaking process and the surprises which come with each layering of color.
Cynthia Back’s work is included in the collections of The Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Newark Public Library as well as numerous corporate and private collections.