car insurance rates A forty-year retrospective of work by Joan Lyons is currently on display at Rochester Contemporary gallery in Rochester, NY through February 24. The exhibition is a part of RoCo’s “Maker/Mentor” series whereby influential artists exhibit alongside those they have guided, supported, and influenced. In the case of Lyons, the list of those mentored is long. She is founder of the VSW Press, publisher of over 450 titles including hundreds of artists’ books as well as critical texts such as Artists’Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (1985), edited by Lyons and groundbreaking for the field. Many VSW Press titles were included as a small reading room in the exhibition and the volumes certainly contribute to one’s awareness of the prolificacy of Lyons as a printer, publisher, and imagemaker. To my mind, Lyons’s work is concerned with ideas of print. No matter the medium she is working with, be it photograph, book, paper, or quilt, she investigates marks made by impression.

Through her study of print, Lyons has consistently redefined surface. On display are alternative-process, photographic prints dominated by portraits of many artists’ feet on paper, which shows signs of buckling and creasing. Hands and legs figure-in with lighter tones of the sun print’s signature brown palette to play with surface depth and express how our bodies relate to space. Other impressions, though less direct, include
Lyons’s face and torso pressed against the glass of early Xerographic devices.

Lyons also turned the earth into a printing press. For a period she buried books in the ground letting time inscribe the pages with soil and moisture. Looking at the objects we see how surface comes to be conflated with environments. Turning to more abstract examples of surface and print, there is a selection of the photographic installation “Representations” that even-handedly looks at how images stand-in for men and women throughout media culture. All the while, Lyons comments on her role of imagemaker, showing us the glint of light reflecting from glossy magazines, the television screen, and the frame around the art-historical object. Lyons’s work with representation can also be seen in masterful cyanotypes from her “Gynecologist” series and book depicting distortions of the female body and reproductive organs. This work, like the rest of the retrospective exhibition, is complex, feminist, oftentimes funny, frequently polemical, and leaves a very strong impression.

~ Tate Shaw

Joan Lyons

Rochester Contemporary

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