Wally Dion at Remai Modern

editions

October 2024

Dion at Remai Modern
Wally Dion
Rachel Collage Portraits

READ full article on 'Galleries West' by Nancy Tousley

Jillian Ross spent two intense weeks with Wally Dion as part of the exhibition-cum-installation Live Editions: Jillian Ross Print at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada. Dion who lives and works from Binghamton, New York, has a strong following in Saskatoon and regularly spends time in the prairie town in which he grew up. The below text is from an article written by Nancy Tousley who travelled from Calgary to Saskatoon to spend time with Wally and Jillian and learn about the project they were working on.

This article was first published in Galleries West on 5 August 2024, written by Nancy Tousley.

Dion, a member of Yellow Quill First Nation (Salteaux), who was born and grew up in Saskatoon and visits frequently from Binghamton, New York, where he now lives. Dion, 46, is known for constructing traditional images with contemporary materials and infusing them with new meanings. Large works that evoke aerial views of land and cities and morning star quilt patterns are made with cut-up circuit boards that are collaged or strung into quilts and tapestries; his big portraits of Indigenous women and men show them as strong, productive urban people; his transparent silk star quilts unfurl above the prairies like ethereal blankets or flags.

Ross is from Saskatchewan, too. She and Dion went to university together, but lost touch after she moved in 2003 to South Africa, where she lived until 2020. She has worked with Kentridge, producing brilliantly innovative prints for 17 years and continues to do so now that she is back in Saskatoon. Her reputation as a master printer precedes her: when Dion decided to make his first prints since grad school, he sought her out.

Together artist and printer are developing an ongoing series of unique prints with a relatively new intaglio process called photopolymer gravure. Developed in 1989, it was initially used commercially for offset lithography and letterpress printing and increasingly by artists during the past 20 odd years. A variant of traditional copperplate photogravure, whose roots go back to the beginnings of photography, photopolymer gravure is known for its long range of smooth, nuanced tones. Ross has deftly employed it to give remarkable depth to the jungle-like scenes in William Kentridge’s How To Explain Who I Was and Citizens, What Have They Done with All the Air I, II and III, which stem from his theatrical production The Great Yes, The Great No (2024), and which she editioned during her time at Remai Modern exhibition Live Editions: Jillian Ross Print.

Dion is using the same process and a similar colour palette to very different ends. His new prints are based on a portrait of Rachel, a model he has used several times for painting and drawing, who wears long braids and a white satin western shirt. It is Rachel who turns her back on the viewer in Prairie Braids (2023), a pair of photopolymer gravure prints, one red, one black, which are presented side by side in rococo brass frames cast from molten bullet casings poured into the soil of a chosen site. There are two framed sets of these images, which also exist as print editions. For the set made in Saskatoon, the frame was cast on open land in the infamous “Starlight Tours” area beyond the city limits where in the 1970s, 1990s and early 2000s Saskatoon police abandoned Indigenous people, usually men, “to walk it off” in subzero temperatures. Several froze to death.

In the new prints, Rachel faces forward. Dion has broken up her printed image physically into rectangular sections, which repeat in parts as though the image had been shaken by a strong stuttering motion. The sections are then assembled and printed on one sheet, which Dion cuts into 5.5 x 7 inch “cards.” He can experiment with the cards at will, arranging, rearranging and cutting them into even smaller units until he finds a configuration he likes. When these are reassembled and collaged onto a full-sheet printed background, the fragments construct a portrait with a layer of meaning that goes beyond likeness to reveal an inner life.

Rachel is shown to be a woman with heightened vision — she has multiple eyes —perhaps a sybil or oracle who can see into the future. Her braids, which signify strength, culture and spirituality, also multiply. Each new print in the series will be different in colour and the configuration of the fragments. Some will be monochromatic; others will be more than one colour. While the fragmentation might point to Cubism, Dion relates it to the distortions of digital Glitch Art and the work of the Canadian painter/illustrator Alex Garant. However, Dion has worked out how and with what means to achieve the overall effect in collaboration with Ross, who puts her master printer’s deep knowledge and technical skills at the service of artists and their ideas and intentions.

The dynamic between artist and printer is a give and take that enables both to learn, solve problems and achieve results they might not have anticipated at the outset. Dion described himself to me as a perfectionist who felt he might be too rigid. He wanted to try to loosen up. He went into the studio with an image he had painted 12 years earlier when he was looking for a way to bring abstraction into portraiture, as he says a “digital, photographic, photocopy type of abstraction.” He saw the prints Kentridge had constructed with fragments and Ross suggested he try it as a way to work. Dion would initially lose some control in the unfamiliar media of printmaking, which had made him hesitant at first, but he would regain it when it came to putting the fragments together as compositions. This was familiar territory.

Its Just Like You Said It Would Be

Wally Dion

Photopolymer on Gampi, 20gsm, reinforced with Konnyaku, collaged and sewn together with silk and cotton fabric.

Image 135.8cm x 96.5cm (53⅜” x 38“)

2024

Edition 1/1

Images courtesy of the artist.

Dion makes his work in other media — acrylic portrait paintings superimposed with rectangular grids, the cut-up circuit boards collaged into paintings and assembled into pieced quilts and tapestries — in a similar way. The grid has been the ever-present substructure of his work. Collaborating with Ross, it becomes the matrix for their experimentations, which remain visible in the variations on a theme within the unique prints. The distorting abstractions of the model’s image give her a metaphysical presence and intensity.

“Rachel’s personality and life direction refers to a spiritual journey, alternate vision and awareness,” Dion says. “As does my path and the way I think on such things. But this is very true of many Indigenous people: an alternative way of seeing. I bring up vision in my art practice.”

Inevitably, as with other artists who make prints, Dion’s experience of collaborative printmaking will feed back into his practice. It will influence other forms and materials he uses and perhaps lead to new ones. How that will happen we will have to wait to see. The word from Saskatoon is that it might have something to do with paper. ■

Nancy Tousley, a Governor General’s Award laureate, is a senior art critic, art journalist and independent curator. Thank you to Galleries West and Nancy Tousley for the use of their article on our website.

Konnyaku treatment

1/2

Just my Imagination

Wally Dion

Photopolymer on Gampi, 20gsm, reinforced with Konnyaku, collaged and sewn together.

Image dimension 114.3m x 69cm (45” x 27¼“)

2024

Edition 1/1

Taking the process one step further, the same photopolymer plates were printed onto handmade Japanese gampi paper, a very thin (20gsm) but tough paper with short fibres made from the inner bark of the gampi bush found in the mountainous regions of Japan. The art of making this paper by hand is dying out and the paper is becoming more difficult to source.

Once printed, the gampi paper was reinforced with konnyaku paste from the Konjac plant, another Japanese inonovation used in a variety of ways to strengthen paper. In this instance it makes the thin gampi paper soft and supple much like the silk fabric that Wally Dion uses to make is his brilliant Star Quilts.

The gampi is treated with konnyaku paste, and the paste is worked deep into the fibres of the paper by scrunching it into a ball. The paper is then laid down flat on boards and left to dry. Once dried it is stretched, taped and ironed flat. The creases from scrunching remains and gives the paper a physical and visual texture, like leather, that also helps add structure.

As with the 'cards' printed onto Hahnemuhle, the gampi cards are cut down to size and collaged together to make up the image. Cotton fabric is used to break the image in places. These are sourced from traditional scarves in brilliant a red and green, almost matching the colors of the Aurora. Once assembled these 'fabric cards' are expertly sewn together by Dion, with fringes added to the bottom of the quilt as a finishing touch.

These "paper quilts" are phenomenal. We will be working with Wally to develop a new body of work that is based on this method of printing, reinforcing and stitching fine papers together.

A special thank you to Remai Modern for their support on this project

which allowed an investigation and experimentation into art making.

This type of support forms part of their commitment to the arts and

to the local arts community in Saskatchewan.

Live Editions: Jillian Ross Print was curated by Chief Curator Michelle Jacques

and Assistant Curator Bevin Bradley.

The making of the Rachel Collage Portraits' at Remai Modern with Jillian Ross Print.