This limited edition portfolio skowheganBOX no. 2  features original photo-based works by Letha Wilson, John Houck,, Brian Bress and Lucas Blalock—four artists who are Skowhegan alumni. Each box set within the edition is unique.

Letha Wilson, Skowhegan 2009, presents an individually hand-folded C-print titled Headlands Golden Cement Fold. Each work is hinged to museum board and set in BOX no. 2 within a custom-made, archival tray. In Wilson’s work, sculptural interventions converge with landscape photographs. For Headlands Golden Cement Fold she selected a photograph of a sunset taken in California, printed the image in the darkroom, and then folded the work before dipping it in concrete. The folds dictated the way the cement crept over the image that was then flattened back out, scanned, and reprinted as an edition of digital C-prints. Each individual print was subsequently accordion-folded by hand along the original fold lines, retaining the three-dimensional aspect of the original process, but the photographic illusion of the white cement residue.

John Houck, Skowhegan 2008, offers a new body of work that expands upon his Aggregates series. Entitled Variable Shadow #1, Houck creates a parametric series in which each print in the edition is a unique variation within a defined set. To create Variable Shadows, Houck made two silkscreens, one of a shadow and the other of a combinatorial pattern from the Aggregates. The screens were produced five times the size of the final print size, enabling Houck to turn the screens at a different angle for each print. In this fashion, he was able to create a variable edition in which each work is unique.

Brian Bress, Skowhegan 2007, contributes two discrete portraits titled Organizing The Physical Evidence, a costumed pair that is reflective of the absurdist characters that have populated his work for the past several years. Known for incongruous juxtapositions and brash experiments across medium, Bress frequently marries drawing, painting, video and sculpture to create layered works that unfold over time. In the photographs for BOX no.2 his prop-laden figures are depicted in a suspended state of transformation that is quietly, and powerfully, affecting. 

Lucas Blalock, Skowhegan 2011, presents THIMGS, a series of unique hardcover books in three sizes. Each set in BOX no.2 contains a single book with one photographic spread, printed by the artist, and then bound into a hand-made book by Biruta Auna with a foil stamped cover designed by Blalock. His project for BOX no. 2 pushes beyond reproduction and presents an individual photograph or pair of photographs as a discrete state that takes the form of a book. Exploring the tension between photograph, book, and sculptural object, the obsessively crafted volumes are an opportunity to engage with Blalock’s distinctive, irreverent images in an intimate and layered form.

Courtesy of Skowhegan