Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla’s woodcut prints Dust Storm I, II, and III are the newest works in the artists’ decade-long exploration of advanced printmaking, which has a long standing tradition in Puerto Rico where they live and work.
Recalling the political origin of the graphic arts, the works depict a U.S. military base in Afghanistan being overtaken by an intense dust storm, or haboob. The image comes from video footage found online from which the artists then derived several still images. These low-resolution stills were then processed into a four-color separation that was laser etched onto four wooden panels. The resulting prints reveal a confrontation between the complex shapes and patterns of the dust storm, the image bitmap, the subtractive color mix, the laser engraving marks, and the wood grain. The unpredictable juxtaposition of these different systems generates a fractal image that makes palpable an endless play between presence and absence, inscription and erasure, appearance and disappearance.
