A Dazzling Display Green Hill Center's exhibition of works by N.C. printmakers is monumental in size, comprehensive in coverage of the medium

GREENSBORO -- You would think that 2008 had been formally declared the "Year of Printmaking," given the focus on printed art in several exhibitions on view or opening soon in the Piedmont Triad. An "Invitational Printmaking Exhibition" opens Monday in Salem College's Fine Arts Center Gallery, and an international print show goes on view March 6 at 5ive & 40rty. Those shows will have a long way to go to outdo the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art's "PRINTED: Contemporary Prints & Books by North Carolina Artists," which opened in mid-January.

"PRINTED" lives up to its billing as "the most comprehensive exhibition of North Carolina print and book artists to date," thanks to its guest curator Bill Fick, a printmaker, the director of Chapel Hill's Cockeyed Press and a visiting assistant professor of drawing and design at Duke University. His print installation Disasters 24/7 was on view early last year at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

Fick and 42 other artists who live or have lived in the state are represented in this show of more than 300 individual works. He and the Green Hill Center's curator, Edie Carpenter, outdid themselves in installing a highly varied array of prints, artist-made books, printed sculptures and related materials, including displays of printmaking tools and techniques. A number of pieces are suspended from the ceiling, wrapped around columns, stretched out across the floor or otherwise unconventionally displayed.

Among the show's most impressive images by virtue of their vivid, atmospheric detail are Dazzala T. Knight's six dark intaglio portraits of black women. These intimately scaled prints include a close-up of a traditionally coiffed and bead-bedecked Massai woman and several views of women in domestic settings. In Knight's Hurricane Floyd, Memories Washed Away, a woman sits outdoors in a stuffed armchair with floodwater up to her waist, presumably on the site of a house that no longer exists.

Matthew Egan's more expressionistic color lithographs also seem to reference larger narratives, albeit more ambiguous ones. Their settings and the clothing worn by their subjects evoke Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The detailed, weirdly distorted figures and groups of figures in the monochromatic lithographs of Kore Loy Wildrekinde McWhirter appear to be melting, decomposing or deteriorating into tatters while remaining alive, active and alert, if painfully so. Incorporated into these images are their titles, which reference uncomfortable emotional states and personality disorders.

Related to McWhirter's images by virtue of their emphasis on distorted human figures are three photographically based digital prints from Beth Grabowski's "Nostomania" series. These frontal views of a woman's face are vertically compressed or otherwise reshaped and thereby transformed into weirdly mask-like visages embellished with superimposed scrollwork patterns.

Photographs also serve as the basis for Scott Ludwig's "Gris-Gris" series, five mixed-media prints in which images of dead fish, ropes and fragmentary maps of the Gulf Coast region serve as references to the impact of recent storms.

Jennifer Page uses photographic imagery more straightforwardly in her "Transformation" series, six monochromatic photo etchings of cell-phone towers.

In three intaglio monoprints from his "Fragments" series, John Ford makes more nuanced use of photographs -- old ones in this case -- along with fragments of other printed sources. Dress patterns, scientific illustrations and close-up photos of coins and a cicada are among the more prominent visual components in these prints, which also incorporate faded photos of rural landscapes and industrial architecture.

Matthew Ehlbeck pays homage to Albrecht Durer and other early biblical and mythological illustrators in his linocut titled Jesus in New York. A parrot perches on the head of Jesus, who flashes a V-sign with one hand and holds a cross in the other as he stands against a background dense with trees, vines, architecture and stylized fish.

Roy Nydorf's eight monotypes, centering on stylized birds with outstretched wings, are among the show's more strikingly iconic figural works. Most of them incorporate collage elements, including a photo of a woman's hand in one case.

The stylized floral imagery in Stacy Lynn Waddell's irregularly shaped Field of Flowers, another striking piece on view nearby, was burned into the paper using three branding irons displayed alongside it.

Among the show's outstanding works in a more abstract vein are five large minimalist woodcuts by Anne Conner, four smaller, graffiti-inspired woodcuts by Merrill Schatzman and two micro-organismically referenced collograph monotypes by April Flanders.

Highlights among the show's sculptural works include Matt Liddle's "Critical Masses," a series of five accordion-folded forms imprinted with art-conscious, self-referential texts and suspended from the ceiling like Japanese paper lanterns.

Also noteworthy are the works by Scott Betz, Laurie Corral, David Faber, Andy Farkas, Kyoko Masutani, Clarence Morgan, Susan Page and a duo called Fort Grunt.

■ "PRINTED: Contemporary Prints & Books by North Carolina Artists" is on view through Feb. 29 at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro Cultural Center, 200 N. Davie St. Call 336-333-7460.