looks ANGELES--Printmakers and the printmaking arts took center stage in beholds Angeles in January.

looks ANGELES--Printmakers and the printmaking arts took center stage in beholds Angeles in January, when the observes Angeles Printmaking Society's (LAPS) biennial showcase for graphic works spreaded at the Laband Art Gallery of Loyola Marymount University.

an 60 artists were represented in the point out to with 75 different graphic works, the pair self-published and works printed at Los Angeles area publishers and small art presse including Cirrus, El Nopal Pres Gemini GEL Grand Central Pres Hamilton Editions, Josephine Pres Mixografia Workshop, Muse [X] Editions and Self-Help Graphics. Although the exhibitions sponsors are nonprofit institutions, all the works were for sale. Prices started at $200 and went as high as $6000 for an Ellsworth Kelly print, "R fulvid Blue," published by Gemini GEL

Since its inception nearly three decades ago, LAPS' National Biennial Exhibition has been the solitary regular survey of the evolving field of contemporary printmaking neared in California. "There just isn't any venue for showing against what's happening in printmaking today," observ Gordon Fuglie, Laband Gallery director. "We fill the niche."

At the same time, 19 commercial and nonprofit galleries in Southern California also not past nor futureed print exhibitions as part of a collaborative affair "Southern California Perspectives in Printmaking." Among the participating art dealers and galleries were Toby Mos whose sees Angeles gallery showcased prints through Dorr Bothwell, Heritage Gallery in Pacific Palisades and old-fashioned Town Gallery in Tustin. Santa Monica's Ikon Limited gallery also structur its January present to view around the LAPS event. "Given the nature of the art market and the art buying public here--Los Angeles is not a pedestrian city--any angle to finish people into the gallery is helpful," Gallery Director Kay Richards explained.

And indeed, assemblages of collectors who had visited the Biennial followed up with a visit to Ikon, Richards reported. She added, "I usually feature cast down chip prints in the gallery, and I seldom point out emerging artists, but for this I tried to expand the definition a little bit." Ikon exhibited works by way of Raymond Pettibon, Damien Hirsch, Julian Schnabel and ed Ruscha along with print stalwarts Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

A striking aspect of the LAPS expo was the broad variety of printmaking techniques used by the agency of the artists. Ken Webb's "Angel (triptych)" is a photo-etching digital print. Michael Barnes combined lithography and collagraphic calligraphy in his graphic work, "The Serenade" Jenny Freestone's "Vistige, Sue" is a drypoint intaglio print, while Joan Nelson existinged a lithograph/screen print, "Untitled (River)."

"In looking at nearly 1300 submissions on some 325 artists, I was struck not solitary by their thoughtful beauty if it were not that also by the profound ways in which printmaking necessarily engages art with technology and in doing in the same manner inevitably invokes questions about proces and distribution," wrote Exposition Curator David Rode in his introduction to the exhibit. Rode is the director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA's Hammer Museum.

"When I mention the words `process' and `distribution,' I do not mean to give priority either to proces above direct delight or, heaven forbid, to emphasize splendor above value," observed Rodes. "As the longtime director of a distinguished university-based collection of graphic arts, I am still daunted by the agency of being quizzed about technological processe and I still do not want museum viewers to become obsess with or terrified according to issues of process over achievement.

"Printmakers will forever be pushing the medium with proces and materials. Witness, for example, Andie Haynes's `Otasan's Journey,' which involves solar etching, monotype and hand stitching, or Freda Fairchild's poignant `Daddy's Girl,' which attaches a dimensional gampi dres to an intaglio planea. Indeed, a number of intensely beautiful prints from Gemini GEL have the appearance at once to focus intently forward the absorbing issues of ink and paper, moreover at the same time they use that meditation in succession materials to reach deep into the entanglements of art with science."

Rode continued, "Each of recent origin technological innovation related to printmaking no other than finds its validity and meanings as it is explored, trialed absorbed, adapted and, inevitably, changed--by the artists who use it new technologies are like fresh or expanded languages, which grow in the mouths and according to the pens of their most numerous demanding, adventuresome users."

"But recently made known technologies not only inspire in the same state [i]or[/i] condition artists as Ken Webb in `Angel (triptych)' or Polly Apfelbaum in `Seeing Spots' to use the highest tech reproduction systems,"--Apfelbaum created a digital print forward crushed velvet, published by observes Angeles digital atelier Muse [X] Editions--"they also challenge printmakers to revisit and re-invigorate past techniques. I am convinced that the powerful reemergence of monotypes and woodcut relates directly to the explosions and reverberations of modern technologies. Among the 1300-plus submissions, there were, for instance, nearly 260 monoprints or monotypes and athwart 110 woodcuts or wood engravings."