SGC International Conference • Knoxville, Tennessee • March 18-21, 2015

Prints in peculiar places

Deep (Fried) Ruin

Sidewalk along KCDC Parking Lot West of The Standard

Devin Balara
James Boychuk-Hunter

In “Deep (Fried) Ruin,” Knoxville-based artists Devin Balara and James Boychuk-Hunter create a sculptural/print work that addresses the controversial Kudzu plant, both visually spectacular and ominous in its proliferation across the southern United States. The project involves a kind of “tip-of-the-iceberg” illusion produced with irregular steel structures seeming buried near a hillside covered with the plant. The structures would represent just that: structure, form, order coupled with a visualization of time’s effects. The surface of the structures would be etched with patterns extracted from photographs of kudzu. The textured surface, along with a weatherproof box containing paper and green crayons, would prompt the viewers to take rubbings from the forms themselves. The act of producing a rubbing from a surface is one of the earliest forms of printmaking, from a single matrix you can produce countless multiples.

Contact Sphere Knoxville at sgci2015@gmail.com 1715 Volunteer Blvd., School of Art, Knoxville, TN 37996