On Printmaking, Slowness as Resistance, and Odes to Feminine-Coded Labor

review by Calli Ferguson

Here & Elsewhere : all street Gallery east 3rd St through 11/30/2025

Printmaking, in its genesis, is rooted in technological advancement, scaled communication, and reproduction. But the show centered on the medium that opened this month at All Street Gallery is, by contrast, tangibly intimate, personal, and offers slowness as a form of resistance and reckoning with concepts of grief, self, and archive.

While printmaking’s historical and potential applications seem to be at odds, there is an ease to how it exists in the show currently on view at the gallery’s East 3rd location, where the medium’s narratives (as with several others) feel to be in conversation rather than in conflict.

The idea for Here & Elsewhere started here: with an interest in printmaking as a medium. It was something that co-curators Eden Chinn and Cora Hume-Fagin started meditating on early this summer, and would evolve (with time) into the intimate and collaborative story told within the gallery walls. That journey involved opening a dialogue with the 5 artists exhibited in this show: Golnar Adili, Paria Ahmadi, Setare Arashloo, Ashley Page, and Kyung Eun You. The interests, curiosities, and expressions of these printmakers overlapped in somewhat surprising ways; themes of grief, archival content, identity, and ancestry emerged, and artists shared a draw to the medium because of the notably involved process.

The ideas that connected the artists became the show’s narrative. And while they feel like some of the most personal inspirations an artist can work with, the works in Here & Elsewhere are also able to uncover social realities, revealing how the personal archive can also be a collective one. In this show, printmaking is not only about reproduction, but also recreation—of memory, lineage, and self.

Connotations of ‘reproduction’ is something the curators considered heavily, and became particularly sticky given the show’s all-woman lineup of printmakers. “I think the exhibition focusing on women printmakers is a way to give credit to women as reproducers of culture– both in a familial sense with traditional women's roles in the family, but also socially.” Eden explained to me at our preview, “Our role as communicators and organizers, in a political sense, is really important.” She went on to describe how the medium also speaks to active slowness as a form of resistance. Soon after printmaking was popularized, the medium naturally slipped from the realm of mass communication into the hands of artists— becoming a form of ‘bottom-up’ communication. In Here & Elsewhere, five women artists approach printmaking with a tenderness for its craft-like nature. In the slow and detail-oriented experience of this kind of art making, live forms traditionally ‘feminine’ labor.

The show in itself has a way of inviting viewers to slow down. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is met with a beautifully visceral piece by Golnar Adili, Embrace Pillow. The thrice-repeated print of a man’s arms in a sort of embrace is sewn into stuffed fabric. Adili's work is one of many in the show that draws from family archives– in this case, an image of her father, who was an Iranian political activist and architect. A handful of years after he passed, the artist, living in New York City, was able to recover some of his archives, many of which were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. The value of her family’s physical memory made its way into her work, with an interest in her father’s hands as a symbol of his labor and craft. Rounding out her personal family narrative (as well as a larger one around seperation in political upheaval), the show also includes one piece of her mother’s eyes, Dust of Sorrow (Ghobar e Gham), and a stunning sculptural take on an ‘Artist’s Book’, A Thousand Pages of Chest In A Thousand Mirrors, depicting the artist’s own chest displayed just beneath it.

Golnar Adili *Dust of Sorrow (Ghobar e Gham),*‍ and ‍*A Thousand Pages of Chest In A Thousand Mirrors.* c/o All Street

Setare Arashloo, *Holding Together*, c/o All Street

Directly across from Embrace Pillow, Setare Arashloo’s works of her grandmother’s hands, Looking for Thread’s End, mirrors the gestural language, this time exploring labor through maternal lineage. This ode to the detail in her grandmother’s craft and textile work is then repeated in the gallery space on two multimedia works, Held by Threads and Holding Together, that also incorporate fabric materials.

In both cases, the show’s somewhat surprising motifs of hands, textiles, and gestural language are used to connect us to craft, touch, and memory. These works reveal printmaking not as a means of mechanical reproduction, but language of intimacy.

[right] Setare Arashloo, *Held by Threads*; [left] Paria Ahmadi “for now.” from *Mapping of Memories*- *Architectures of time*, c/o All Street

Sitting with these artworks and meditations on archived familial narratives also poses questions on how history has traditionally decided what is deemed “important”. What is archived? And what is erased? How do we protect and revitalize stories within traditionally ‘feminine’ or otherwise forgotten spaces? And interestingly… how might we archive in forms beyond the traditional patriarchal structures?

Paria Ahmadi, “Marriage” from *Family / stories from childhood series* + install c/o All Street

Like the moving portraiture in Adili’s works, Paria Ahmadi also incorporates images of herself and her mother, positioning maternal lineage and self in conversation through two pieces printed on the front and back of rug samples found on 14th Street. “Birthday Dance” and “Marriage” from Ahmadi’s Family/stories from childhood series are screenprinted from photographs in Ahmadi’s mother’s archive. Meanwhile, the rug sample canvas calls back the use of textile in Arashloo’s work, and evokes a similar homage to feminine-coded labor and craft. It’s easy to find these ways in which artworks are playfully in song together as you bounce between them, and art (slow craft, particularly) becomes a mode of archiving what history might otherwise let decay.

In so many ways, the narratives in the gallery space are coexistent and collaborative, but nonlinear. Curated in a gallery-style layout between Ahmadi’s rug pieces, prints on match paper make up part of the artist’s Safety Matches series. The pocket-sized pieces feature screenshots from protests and moments in Taran- some captured on FaceTime with her mother. It makes for a striking (for lack of a less obvious word) assortment of images– abstracted within frames just enough for viewers to connect to, playing with and relating to the narratives in our own ways.

Ashley Page brought in these themes to her work through experimenting with ideas of erased and imagined stories. Two pieces on handmade paper explore the historical recovery of stories of an enslaved woman who lived at the Tate House Museum in Georgia, where Page had spent time for a residency, for whom there were almost no records. Page dedicated her work in her Beyond the North Star Series to imagining this woman’s life, intentionally including moments of peace and rest.

Ashley Page “Seeking Peace” from Beyond the North Star Series, c/o All Street

The two works from the series on view at All Street, “Seeking Peace” and “Beyond the North Star is a Railroad to Heaven,” are creative acts down to each detail. They incorporate Page’s own paper-making, the show’s motif of hands, as well as things like laundry hanging, in acknowledgement of this woman’s labor. But Page also includes symbols like lavender, an olive branch, and cowry shells, through which she’s able to offer the potential narratives of hope, peace, and divination to the story dreamed up in these layered works.

In another beautiful example of imaginative storytelling beyond linear chronology, where are we now?, an Artist Book by Kyung Eun You, circles the viewer back to the personal and familial. Black and white graphics are replicated into patterns on the page, this time used to convey narrative abstraction and nonlinear storytelling. In connection with craft, rather than sequencing the images in some sort of timeline, they follow traditional quilt patterns. Each page has a sort of aesthetic familiarity in that way. Rather than using the reproducibility of printmaking for efficiency’s sake, here, it is once again utilized for something much more intimate: the nonlinear processes of grief and memory.

[left] Paria Ahmadi “Birthday Dance” from *Family / stories from childhood series,* [right] Kyung Eun You *where are we now* (Artist Book) and “wish you hit me” from *where are we now*, c/o All Street

It all seems to ground itself in harmonious contrasts… the medium chosen for its slowness vs invented for its mass production; speaking to global political narratives through hyper-personal stories of self and family; nonlinear narratives both archiving and imagining histories of both conflict and nostalgia.

But in this duality, there is (as is often the case) also coexistence. They are different and the same. Repeated images are replications and truth. They are here and elsewhere. In this concept is, in my opinion, one of the most profound aspects of this deeply thoughtful exhibition.

Conflicting truths are present in the pritnmaking medium, as well as the artist's stories as they relate to place and displacement, memory, and identity. The show’s title, Here & Elsewhere, is also in loose conversation with (or at times in anecdotal response to) the 1970s French film “Ici et Ailleurs,” which speaks to themes of repeated imagery of violence and desensitization in mass media through its central narrative in 70s Palestine. In the exhibition, though, printmaking is positioned as a response.

“Printmaking is a tool to sort of reconcile that dissonance of the here and the elsewhere through that one medium,” explained Cora. And in addition to the product of a recreated image of “elsewhere”, there is the lengthy process of sitting with the imagery, which is inherently necessary to making art this way.

It’s outlined in Ici et Ailleurs through the philosophical concept of “et” (the French word for “and”). ‘Et’ might be repeated imagery (oftentimes violent, commercial, or both): an image and another and another and another… all in rapid abundance. But it’s also the merging of that reality- depicted in that image, of a place (or story) far away– with our own. Ici et Ailleurs, Here and Elsewhere.

Perhaps, in a world inundated with images, art can slow us down, make us feel, and offer a personalized touch to an abundance of imagery. This show seems to be proof of that.