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EXCLUSIVE: Master Printer Craig Zammiello and artist Ellen Gallagher discuss their working relationship during the process of creating “DeLuxe” (2004–05), a suite of 60 individual works employing both traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques.
Repetition and revision are central to Ellen Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements appropriated from popular magazines. Initially, Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure. Later she realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring these ‘narratives’ into her paintings—making them function through the characters of the advertisements as a kind of chart of lost worlds. Upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, and lips of minstrel caricatures multiply in detail. Although her work has often been interpreted as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading- from afar the work appears abstract and minimal, and employs grids as both structure and metaphors for experience.
Ellen Gallagher is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Play of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Catherine Tatge. Camera & Sound: Mead Hunt and Mark Mandler. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Ellen Gallagher. Special Thanks: Craig Zammiello of Two Palms Press, New York.