Barbara Balfour

      
Barbara Balfour
York University


Biography

Barbara Balfour is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts, York University. She is the recipient of a 3-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research/Creation grant, entitled In and Out of Print: Text as Multiple. It deals with artists’ writing, within and parallel to art production, and print-based artwork’s relationship to multiplicity. She has exhibited prints, artists’ books, multiples, and installations nationally and internationally. Her background in print media includes experience as a professional printer at Vinalhaven Press, where she worked with Leon Golub, Robert Indiana, and Komar and Melamid. She is a Lifetime Member of Art Metropole, Toronto.

Themed Panel (Proposed)

When does this become that?
In biology, the meme is described as a system of behaviors that are transferred from one organism to another. Rather than employing a genetic strategy, it uses methods of imitation coupled with the power of reproducibility. By applying a meme-like system that transfers behaviors (operations, actions, repetitions and responses) to the discipline of print, the panel asks: “When does this become that?” Inspired by the idea of the meme as a transferable, imitable unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices across time and space, our discussion addresses the impact and subsequent meaning of both transference and repetition—print as a verb and print as a noun.

Brought together by the upcoming Canadian publication, Printopolis, published by Toronto’s Open Studio, the three panelists question what print can teach artists about the potentials within their material practices—how training in print enables artists to employ technical and conceptual strategies across diverse disciplinary and media boundaries. With this in mind, they will also address the printed outcome. What is the end or productive (printerly) effect?

Barbara Balfour begins the discussion with a reflection on the “what” and the “why” of print. Drawing from her experiences as student, instructor, professional printer, curator, writer and artist, she responds to the colloquial musing, “What’s up with print?” Her answers shift between the perspectives of skeptic and advocate, as she analyses her personal relationships to why: why she makes prints; why she teaches print and why she writes about print. Consciously avoiding the territory of how—the techniques employed by printmakers—Balfour confronts the misconceptions and paradoxes related to a print-based practice.

Caroline Langill locates print between the analogue and the digital by examining the work of three contemporary printmakers: Barbara Balfour, Philippe Blanchard and George Walker. She answers, “When does this become that?” with examples that mobilize the material (in all its hands-on messy glory) and the technological (the inherent potential of the digital realm). Langill will also discuss these works relative to Greenbergian ideas of overallness, to the embodied nature of printmaking, and the impact of embodied art practices on experiences of community.

Jenn Law discusses the concepts of mastery and transference in relation to contemporary printmaking practices, reflecting on how artisanal knowledge is produced and embodied through material process.  Focusing on the work of Jeannie Thib, Penelope Stewart and the art-making duo Hallie Siegal and Matt Donovan, Law examines print as a set of aesthetic and conceptual strategies applied across diverse media.  Here, transference is presented as a pedagogical methodology as well as a process of technological and conceptual exchange. In looking at “when this becomes that”, Law celebrates print’s chameleon-like ability to simultaneously mimic and inform other media, while remaining faithful to a distinctly graphic outcome.