Ruth Bachofner Gallery is pleased to present Batholith Etchings, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Eben Goff. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, June 11, 5-7 PM.
For this exhibition, Eben Goff brings together a series of monoprints, which align processes and imagery generated in the studio with the natural world. Geologic forces produce batholiths, the rock outcroppings referred to in the show’s title, and echo the transformative processes in Goff’s printmaking; time, friction and pressure combine with cycles of submersion and exposure. In his
work, irregularly shaped aluminum plates are routinely inked and passed through the press, and subsequently hewn into smaller and smaller shards. Each pass brings a series of accumulated
impressions on white paper resulting from tests, chance, revisions and resolve. The unseen encounters occurring within the press creates an array of fractured, splintered, gauzy planes that
lean, topple and overlap one another. The transparency of the abraded shapes creates a fabric-like buoyancy, while their graphic delineation and jostled arrangement elicits the heft and semblance of
stacked boulders.
Along with prints, the show includes a sculpture comprised of work ledgers from an historic mining operation. This tribute to and artifact of human endeavor, occurring within the depths of rock,
creates a conceptual seam between the geologic processes and the artist’s material interventions manifest in the surrounding work.
“In concert with the monoprints,” the artist states, “the pattern of these human efforts and the actions of nature are enfolded. Encased in the cool preserve of the aluminum frames, the Batholith
Etchings achieve a hard-and-fast permanence describing their very opposite: Imagery that speaks with a graphic crispness of the mutable qualities of our world, its transient configurations rendered
as a series of random orders within the rules of a specific material character, a portent of decay presented as a poetic grace.”