Tyler Printmaking is pleased to present this year’s Print Think conference, titled Mutable Matrix, on Saturday, May 16. Whether they call what they are producing variable editions, mono-prints, drawings, or something else entirely, contemporary printmakers have increasingly found something plastic within the frozen gestures of their plate, stone, block, or screen. This vision of the matrix as mutable has offered artists a new means of exploring the tension between the gestural and graphic. Traditionally, the gold standard of print production has been the edition—a series of identical prints in which the matrix is the means and the map by which artists finesse a number of uncanny duplicates. The mutable matrix allows for a new sense of play, a new found exploration of chance and intuition within the very process of printing the page, while new ways of working often escape the page altogether.

Please join us in this exploration, conversation, and celebration of the ways printmakers have broken rules, hacked procedures, gone off the rails, and/or invented new ways of working in which the sanctity of the copy has been superseded by a curiosity about the possible.

The conference features: Kathan Brown, Founding Director of Crown Point discussing her work with John Cage, Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Director of Galleries at Tufts University discussing the work of Nancy Spero, artists Rob Swaniston, and Ken Wood and a tour of the Richard Tuttle exhibition at the Fabric Workshop.. We will end our day at The Print Center with gallery talks by artist Ken Wood on his work and John Caperton, the Jensen Bryan Curator on the Michael Mazur exhibition. A reception will follow.