will price

PRAX 300 SU91

summer 2023

meaningful object!

a poem by musician/poet david berman called "cassette county"

much of his writing feels like a home to me - obtuse, relaxed, hyper-vigilant in its depiction of daily life in north america, witty, and (of course) deeply sarcastic. he seems to find the fluttering disconnect between the forceful satisfaction of those in tv commercials and the everyday sardonic reality of feeling deeply disembodied by consumer culture.

meaningful object ---- response!

responding to the idea of seawater

the idea of the sea, and the water composing it, makes me float. it's been too long since i've been reminded of my grand insignificance, the fragility of buoyancy, and the reality that our thoughts and feelings (and the way they "flow" through our minds) are what keep us tethered to the material ground around us.

i went into this wanting to act like a little kid, to draw without inhibition. it felt pretty good at the end of the day.

PRAXIS PROJECT PROPOSAL!

I would like to refine my process as much as is possible in this short month-long window. In order to accomplish that, I need a loose goal. My goal, as of this moment, is to push the physical restraints I find myself abiding by in my print practice, be them the physical boundaries of the paper, the historical context that dictates exactly how much spacing I need, or the more formal elements of the print process. I would like to combine plate lithography and silkscreen, in a 3 to 5 panel style finished project.

Building on the style and process I’ve been refining during my time at Emily Carr, I want to engage with the loose, freehand and self-reflective minute to minute physical development that I’ve found to be meaningful. This brings me much closer to my general area of artistic examination - to explore the liminal space between organic and synthetic lines in our day to day lives and give their ever changing point of connection a more prominent voice in space and form. I want to use repetitive motion, exaggerated flow, and importantly, energetic confluence, to create a multi-panel display of this liminal space’s core.

Given the time required to complete this project to its final stage as it exists in my mind today, I would like to give myself the space to leave this class with the project itself substantially developed but potentially unfinished (most panels completed, the rest at least ready to print and consider the assembly of). I believe that this would give me the best chance at exploring and deepening my relationship with my practice in this short window of time without the haphazard approach that follows me into rushed creative atmospheres.

PROJECT PROCESS

ARTIST STATEMENT

Will Price is an American visual artist currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia, pursuing a BFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His print-based practice examines the organic and the inorganic, and their intersection’s implication, investigated through the liminal space created by their dichotomy. To better understand this affliction, he seeks to explore and topographically map the interior of this liminal space through gesture, line, and confluence.

He is in constant conversation with his positionality as a settler living on unceded Indigenous land belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples and with how his positionality influences the lens through which he perceives all that he attempts to learn.

reference artists -

Blair Whiteford
https://www.blairwhiteford.com/

Tim Brawner
https://www.timbrawner.com/

This is meant to be in praise of the interval called hangover,
a sadness not co-terminous with hopelessness,
and the North American doubling cascade
that (keep going) “this diamond lake is a photo lab”
and if predicates really do propel the plot
then you might see Jerusalem in a soap bubble
or the appliance failures on Olive Street
across these great instances,
because “the complex Italians versus the basic Italians”
because what does a mirror look like (when it’s not working)
but birds singing a full tone higher in the sunshine.

I’m going to call them Honest Eyes until I know if they are,
in the interval called slam-clicker, Realm of Pacific,
because the second language wouldn’t let me learn it
because I have heard of you for a long time occasionally
because diet cards may be the recovery evergreen
and there is a new benzodiazepene called Distance,

anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship.

I suppose a broken window is not symbolic
unless symbolic means broken, which I think it sorta does,
and when the phone jangles
what’s more radical, the snow or the tires,
and what does the Bible say about metal fatigue
and why do mothers carry big scratched-up sunglasses
in their purses.

Hello to the era of going to the store to buy more ice
because we are running out.
Hello to feelings that arrive unintroduced.
Hello to the nonfunctional sprig of parsley
and the game of finding meaning in coincidence.

Because there is a second mind in the margins of the used book
because Judas Priest (source: Firestone Library)
sang a song called Stained Class,
because this world is 66% Then and 33% Now,

and if you wake up thinking “feeling is a skill now”
or “even this glass of water seems complicated now”
and a phrase from a men’s magazine (like single-district cognac)
rings and rings in your neck,
then let the consequent misunderstandings
(let the changer love the changed)
wobble on heartbreakingly nu legs
into this street-legal nonfiction,
into this good world,
this warm place
that I love with all my heart,

anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship.

FINAL PROJECT

After two weeks of trial and error, I wrangled the process I was attempting to work with and pulled five monotypes off of a litho stone. The idea was create a story that could be read from left to right by painting mineral spirits onto the stone as a way of bringing out a rich black from a selected part of the image. This process would result in an extra dark area where the mineral spirits were painted onto the stone for the first print thereafter, but importantly, would leave a ghost image/negative during the ink rolling stage of the following print. This process gave the sequential prints memories of each other in chronological order, and allowed for the allusion of a developing narrative of form.