Author: Scott Peterson

GALC Website

Christine Santos, recipient of the 2023/24 Art Practice and University Library Printmaking Award, is a 2024 graduate of the Art Practice Department at the University of California Berkeley. Two of Christine’s prints, Rainbow State Fantasies and Urgent Lexicon Pinay, have been added to the Graphic Arts Loan Collection and can be borrowed by students at UC Berkeley starting this fall.

I work in digital painting and recently photocopy art, printmaking, and installation. Pulling from state digital archives and my digital snapshots, I digitally manipulate and assemble them to address colonial omission, aesthetic failure, and non-imperial formations. Connections to speculative fiction, DIY culture, cyberfeminism, and Pop Art movement can be made from my work. For example, Archival Densities is an installation series using altered state records from the Digital Archive of Hawai’i to stage fictional events of resistance. I received the AY 2023 – 2024 Center of Race and Gender Student Research Grant to conduct photographic research at Hawai’i’s Bishop Museum to advance my screen print work in Archival Densities. This includes Rainbow State Fantasies, which is now a part of the Graphics Arts Loan Collection.

Rainbow State Fantasies is a screen print monoprint that complicates the popular romanized colonial idea of the “South Seas Island Paradise”. The failed aesthetic of the American curio postcard image of Diamond Head, Hawai’i and suggestive tropical plant silhouettes articulate a visual resistance to this colonial imagination that lingers in Hawai’i’s socioeconomic material culture related to tourism media. Resistance pedagogy and history informs this work as well as Urgent Lexicon: Pinay, the accompanying screen print to this award. Urgent Lexicon: Pinay is inspired by the process of reading Pinay Power by Melinda de Jesus. In this print, I made a handwritten account of the times “pinay” is mentioned and layered it to the point of abstraction.

You can find more about my work here: csantos.xyz

The Art Practice & University Library Printmaking Award is given to the undergraduate student in the Department of Art Practice who has demonstrated an astute understanding of printmaking techniques, as well as an advanced ability to express themselves through the medium of printmaking. This award was established in 2018 by the Department of Art Practice and the University Library, and is given to one or two students each academic year. 

GALC Website

GALC Website

Sharon Carlos Vázquez, recipient of the 2022/23 Art Practice & University Library Printmaking Award, is a 2023 graduate of the Art Practice Department at the University of California Berkeley. Two of Sharon’s prints, Cuarto 3/4 and Cuarto 4/4, have been added to the Graphic Arts Loan Collection and can be borrowed by students at UC Berkeley starting this fall.

Below is an Artist Statement from Sharon about her work:

My recent body of work explores familial relationships, domestic space, location, the senses, and the abstract nature of memory as it dilutes through time. I view the physicality of my process in printmaking as a method of conversation. This layering allows me to translate, redact, and deconstruct dialogue into gestural imagery and color, which I often literally separate into smaller pieces. Through these techniques, I re-envision memories, blurring the line between concrete, mundane and intangible. My home, often featured abstractly in this work, is a literal container for these images, both public and private

My process revolves around the notion of developing a sense of ‘public privacy’. I accomplish this through the physical printing process, which involves overlayering and obscuring the underlying information. My approach allows for the information to be given a physical space while also challenging its comprehension. My concept takes inspiration from the architectural structure of my home, as well as the topography and land. These fundamentals serve as a foundation for building and layering imagery and textures. Through an additive method akin to redaction, the original and literal imagery is transformed into a distorted representation.

The Art Practice & University Library Printmaking Award is given to the undergraduate student in the Department of Art Practice who has demonstrated an astute understanding of printmaking techniques, as well as an advanced ability to express themselves through the medium of printmaking. This award was established in 2018 by the Department of Art Practice and the University Library, and is given to one or two students each academic year. 

GALC Website

GALC Website

Ezra Sato is an Art Practice major at the University of California Berkeley. His visual and written work is often experimental and emerges from a desire to play— of wanting to entertain himself throughout the process and to engage with his prospective audience. While he has been drawing from a young age, he started taking it seriously as a practice in high school and has continually worked to maintain that skill.

Two of Ezra’s prints, I MET A GHOST WALKING BACK FROM THE FOG and (Cross-section), have been added to the Graphic Arts Loan Collection, and are available to students at UC Berkeley to borrow. Below are some thoughts on the prints from Ezra.

I don’t know that I have much to say about these two prints beyond the fact that I enjoyed producing them and that I hope they can be similarly pleasurable to observe and sit with. The joy of making art, for me, is often in the revisions— when I’m able to hone in on some detail or apply a method that’ll make the image “complete.” Something that I love about the process is that there is a record of the image as it was being worked through in the form of test prints and prior editions. While those artifacts of the process are not available here, please consider what they might be and play around.

The Art Practice & University Library Printmaking Award is given to the undergraduate student in the Department of Art Practice who has demonstrated an astute understanding of printmaking techniques, as well as an advanced ability to express themselves through the medium of printmaking. This award was established in 2018 by the Department of Art Practice and the University Library, and is given to one or two students each academic year. 

GALC Website