Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Variations, 2018
Photogravure and chine collé using a range of colors of handmade Kozo and Gampi on white Rives BFK paper
Signed, dated and numbered by the artist on recto
Plate size: 17 x 24 inches
Paper size: 20.75 x 27.375 inches
Edition of 20
Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Eye Test (set of 9), 2018
Photogravure and chine collé using a range of colors of handmade Kozo and Gampi on white Rives BFK paper
SIgned, dated and numbered by the artist on recto
Plate size: 14 x 11 inches
Paper size: 20.75 x 16.875 inches
Edition of 3

Wingate Studio is pleased to present our second collaboration with Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Variations and Eye Test, two new editions made in summer 2018. Rafferty utilizes a range of industrial processes in her artistic practice, including kiln-formed glass, printing, powder- coating, intaglio etching and others. For this project, Rafferty chose to print photogravure images on handmade Japanese Kozo and Gampi paper adhered to backing sheets using the chine collé process. The photogravures were reproduced from slide positives found in a photography teacher’s pre-digital archive on Ebay.

Variations is a composition of 33 repeated images. In some cases the iconic image is inverted, adding an element of distortion that counters any semblance of pattern, and creating a unified whole. Eye Test grew out of Variations and features nine identical images, each printed on a different color of the delicate paper. The color progressions in each work are loosely inspired by printing manuals of the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, as well as an outdated function in Photoshop called Variations, itself a version of an analogue printing process known as a “ring-around.” In a visual form of semantic satiation, the eye moves across the repeating features until original meaning gives way to something new.

As in much of her work, Rafferty raises issues of relativity, distortion and vulnerability as she rescues and re-contextualizes these orphaned images. Dropped into the contemporary cultural context, the handmade photogravures are both out of time and documents of technical historical processes. Other images from the same photography archive, along with others, appear in work presented in the artist’s fifth solo show at Rachel Uffner entitled Testing, opening September 12, 2018.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty has exhibited widely since 2001, including solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Eli Marsh Gallery at Amherst College, Fine Arts Center Gallery at University of Arkansas, and a commissioned sculpture for the Public Art Fund. Gloves Off, the first traveling survey of her work with accompanying fully illustrated catalogue published by SUNY Press, completed a three-venue tour last year. The artist was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the 2014 Hammer Biennial in addition to group shows at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; and The Jewish Museum, New York, among many others. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Rafferty is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Paynes II, XIII, X, 2016 (3 from a portfolio of 12 monoprints)
Soft ground etching with chine collé, inkjet transfers, and monoprinting
Paper size: 61.5 x 36 in
Portfolio of 12 monoprints + 2 AP’s + 4 PP’s
Published by Wingate Studio

Wingate Studio is pleased to announce a set of twelve monoprints by Sara Greenberger Rafferty created in winter 2016. Inspired by graphic photographs by Herbert Matter, Herbert Bayer, Man Ray, and Jaroslav Rösler, as well as her family’s history in the garment industry, Rafferty tested many articles of clothing and landed on a long, drop-waist dress she regularly wore 15 years ago. The artist envisioned the plate-making process like an analog scanner, directly translating a soft, three dimensional object into a two dimensional surrogate. The physical quality of the resulting embossed grid of ten plates, which composes and then divides the dress form, lends the print a sculptural aspect that references the original form of its subject. In addition, the page-like grided tiles disrupt the human-sized scale of the print, which is roughly 5 x 3 feet.

With the assistance of the printmakers at Wingate Studio, the artist experimented with the processes available, tailoring them to her own mode of making. Rafferty was drawn to the violence of the press and the way forces ink into the surface of the paper with immense pressure. This became central to the making of the image, and the means by which the various elements of the piece—monoprint, chine collé, etching, and transfer prints—were united. The physicality of the intaglio process, in which the image is created infinitely thin line by line, is similar to the logic of digital printing. Inkjet transfers of to-scale zippers create visual nuisances on the intaglio print, serving as a constellation of deconstructed polka dots that hover over the dress, useless because they are images. United in the final object of the print, the pairings create conversations about consumerism, domesticity, and the body.

In the studio

About the artist

Photography by Alyssa Robb for Wingate Studio

Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978) has exhibited widely since 2001, including solo exhibitions at University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center Gallery, The Kitchen (New York, NY), MoMA PS1 (New York, NY), Eli Marsh Gallery at Amherst College Massachusetts, The Suburban (Chicago, Illinois), and a commissioned sculpture for the Public Art Fund. In 2014 she participated in the Whitney and Hammer Biennials, and had solo exhibitions in Portland, Oregon; Riga, Latvia; and New York, NY. She has recently been included in shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego, CA), the Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), the Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, CO), Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY), Gagosian Gallery (New York, NY), the Jewish Museum (New York, NY), and others, and her work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery. Rafferty teaches at Pratt Institute, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.