Biography

John Hitchcock is an Artist and Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
where he teaches screenprinting, relief cut, and installation art. He was recently an artist in residence at the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium; Proyecto’ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Venice Printmaking Studio, Venice, Italy. Exhibitions include: the University of Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy; South African Museum, Cape Town, South Africa; International Print Center New York, New York; Museum of Arts & Design, New York; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Exit Art, New York; the Print Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Exhibition

Crossing State Lines: A Survey of American Printmakers
Emily Arthur, Associate Professor, University of North Florida, USA and JohnHitchcock, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA respectfully propose the exhibition of “Crossing State Lines: A Survey of American Printmakers,” during the Impact 8 Conference, Borders & Crossings. This proposed exhibition celebrates the widest possible selection of American artists, concepts and print practices including traditional, non traditional and digital/photographic techniques used in contemporary American lithography, etching, screen print, mezzotint and relief printmaking.

This exhibition of hand pulled, original, prints is created to promote the education
of printmaking techniques as they are continually recreated during the professional exploration of concept and practice in the artists’ print studio. Eightyfive artist-printmakers from the US were selected and collated by the “State of the States” portfolio constituency of print faculty from across the United States,
which are: Joseph Velasquez, University of Wisconsin-Stout, Nicole Hand Murray
State University, Kentucky, Ryan O’Malley Texas A & M University, Kathryn &
Andrew Polk, University of Arizona, Emily W. Arthur, University of North Florida,
John Hancock, University of Mary Hardin Baylor in Texas, Marwin Begaye &
Curtis Jones, University of Oklahoma, and John Hitchcock, University of
Wisconsin- Madison.

(Non)Graphic Images of Violence examines the role of the print artist as an explorer in the digital landscape, specifically the video centric realm of YouTube and LiveLeaks. Romantic artists, rebelling against the increased rationalisation of the natural world in the wake of the industrial revolution, took it upon themselves to search for the sublime in the world around them. This project similarly seeks to physically depict the ineffable, by taking amateur videos that have been democratised through media coverage and subsequently affixed to popular history on the web, and compressing the content into singular images. When the temporal grounding of the videos is removed, the combined images become abstracted colour fields open to independent interpretation by a viewer. The source content of nearly all the images is generally referred to as ‘graphic’ in the sense of the depiction of abject violence. However, as the resulting prints are particularly non-representational, the viewer is forced to explore the images ahistorically. Once printed, the images become aesthetic objects bereft of the meaning of their origins, subsequently crossing over from the realm of the terrifying into that of the tranquilising. This project presents multiple lines of question and inquiry concerning intersections between mediums (print and video), the work of art in the age of digital production (further digitising digital media to create digital prints), and art historical traditions (the exploration of neo-Neo-Romanticism). This project has been developed in association with CFPR Editions, part of the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England.