Gordon Barnes
(PORTLAND, OR)

Untitled (King Oscar), Printmaking, 48" x 38"

Hand carved wood block print on monoprinted washi mounted on panel. Entirely produced and printed by Gordon Barnes

My printmaking research is broadly focused on expanding/exploring the intersection of digital and traditional approaches while playfully and humanely challenging what I sees as false binary choices baked in to the way many of us frame our thinking around gender, sexuality, taste, class and craft. In it's current form my work centers on the formal and metaphorical interplay between two very different visual systems. The designs for my woodblock prints are digitally derived, rigidly linear, laboriously hand carved and somehow still deceptively incomplete; while the marbled canvas and paper they're printed on is organic, intuitive and resistant to tight control. My hope is that by uniting these two obviously contrasting visual systems I'm flirtatiously calling viewers to consider the unexpectedly thoughtful richness bubbling beneath the surface of what seems at first like a shallow metaphor.