Duplicate effort

Artists of the copy-machine age

by Leon Nigrosh

PHOTOCOPIER ART: AN EXPLORATION At the George C. Gordon Library at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, through May 22.

The phrase "photocopier art" could be an oxymoron. After all, how could anything produced with the aid of a duplicating

machine be called art? Of course, for nearly 100 years, people regarded photography with the same disdain. But, for better or worse, artists have always embraced new technology that came along and incorporated it into their work. With this in mind, artists Susan Zimmerman and Sonya Evanisko-Long have assembled the works of two dozen artists who have experimented with photocopied images. Thirty-six objects from this traveling exhibit are currently on display in WPI's Gordon Library gallery.

California artist Ellen Golla's 18x24-inch collage Morning Coffee is the best example of straightforward, graphic representation -- with a touch of humor. Cutting and pasting replicated items from old picture books, she presents us with Mount Vesuvius as it erupts from within her large green coffee cup, spewing clouds of gray smoke across the page. Yet we can discern fanciful faces, birds, and animals. Maybe our day won't turn out to be so bad, after all.

At the other end of the technical spectrum, Frank Rozasy, also from California, reinterprets his own paintings with copy machines. After photographing the painting, he manipulates and distorts the subject in a color copier and then repaints a blown-up, black-and-white version of the new composition with intriguing results. His The Wedding is filled with elongated and pixeled figures of the bridal party rendered in yellows and blacks. Superimposed on this image is a colorful, but squashed picture of the smiling wedding couple. We are left to decide what metaphoric situation these oddly re-proportioned individuals represent.

Using duplicated images of her mother's vintage First Communion photograph, Worcester artist Kathleen Cammarata offers two enigmatic, mixed-media works that reflect her consuming interest in family, spirituality, and loves and losses. In c 1933 the caped and gloved young girl appears in several places throughout the composition as an angel with halo, while in other darkly painted areas she is mysteriously shrouded. This same girl also appears in c 1933 again anchored three times across the bottom of the skewed page and appear again as just a head floating in the dark, starry sky. Another Worcester artist, Donna Hamil Talman, manipulates her color laser prints to create an antiqued look that further emphasizes the appearance of natural aging that her human subjects are experiencing in her Presence series.

Oregon artist Arlys Clark has created two miniature free-standing paper landscapes, each nearly three-feet long, which contain numerous laser-copied color photos of a cloaked woman moving through a dark forest, in an atmosphere reminiscent of the TV series Dark Shadows. Using photocopying in its more usual manner, Massachusetts artist Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord, has produced three limited-edition artist's books, each containing calligraphic and typeset pages of reflective thought. Her tiny, twine-bound Lessons from Green Gulch contains koans and questions put to her while at the well-known Zen center, such as: "Can you write with the sound of a big brass bell?"

In the same spirit that this question was proffered, we might return the discussion to the central question raised by this exhibition and ask, "Can you make art with a photocopier?" With the same contemplative thought and musing needed to find the solution for the Zen query, you must look at all of the works in this exhibition, examine them carefully, and then make your decision regarding the efficacy of employing duplicating machines in the pursuit of artistic expression.

The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 831-5410.