PUBLIC WORKS PRESS
Steve Budington, Transplants, variable edition, 11 x 14" (2017)
Drypoint, roulette, mezzotint, etching, surface roll, blind emboss, collage, watercolor, pencil, colored pencil
​
The series title, "Transplants," responds to the anatomical imagery used in the prints, but it's also about transplanting references, imagery, and modes of working from one situation to another. The works contain references to nineteenth-century anatomy, shaped borrowed from maps (the recurring triangles are from Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map), and elements from modernist abstraction (its use of hard geometries and primary color combinations); the inks that were chosen also were often a kind of codified transplant from another medium (graphite inks to reference drawing, or Red Green Blue color patterns to reference screen primaries). While there are many ways to interpret these things, the aim is to bring the various signals, elements, and modes of representation into play, to push one against the other, to animate their relationships and to open them to new definitions.
​
Steve Budington received his MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art and his BFA in painting and art history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Budington’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in New York, at Exit Art, Misc. Gallery, and Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs; in San Francisco, at Mirus Gallery; in Austria, at Hotel Pupik Schrattenberg; and in Italy, at the Fondazione Ambrosetti Arte Contemporanea. His paintings have been discussed in frieze magazine, Art in America, and other publications. Budington lives with his wife, son, and daughter in northern Vermont, where he works and plays electric guitar in a Middlebury based collective dedicated to improvised music.
​
​
Click to enlarge