Close to the Ground

March 18, 2026 – April 24, 2026
Opening Reception: March 28, 3–6 pm

Fanny Allié
Dana Bell
Chakaia Booker
Molly Crabapple
Devraj Dakoji
Michael Eade
Beth Ganz
Patricia Leighton
Nazanin Noroozi
Kenny Rivero
Xin Song
Jia Sung
Michael Kelly Williams
Joshua Woods

EFA Gallery is pleased to present Close to the Ground, an exhibition of works printed at EFA Studios and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Through woodcut, photogravure, lithography, chine collé, intaglio, and blind embossing, the artists in the exhibition engage with printmaking as both a formal discipline and a way of thinking through the concerns that animate their broader practices. Across diverse approaches, the works explore how the printed mark can carry memory, myth, figuration, and humor in equal measure, and how the material conditions of the medium open spaces for shared meaning around the persistence of history in land and site, the fragmentation and play of the human figure, the entanglement of the body with nature and violence, and the charged possibilities of abstraction.

Michael Eade's woodcut draws on Renaissance landscape traditions, transformed through a gradient roll technique that renders the classical contemporary. Beth Ganz turns to photogravure on kozo paper to hold in suspension the layered temporalities of a site scarred by colonial clearance and now quietly returning to forest. Patricia Leighton anchors monumental earthwork in the intimate scale of print, while Kenny Rivero's figuration crackles with disjointed energy and wit.

Michael Kelly Williams and Nazanin Noroozi's works enter into an unspoken dialogue—one invoking testimony, the other the rupture of a childhood interrupted by missile strikes over Iran. Joshua Woods's monotype solvent transfers draw on family photographs and images of childhood friends to build a personal archive of community, faces, and places emerging partially blurred and incomplete, the way memory holds onto the people and moments that shape a life.

Xin Song employs hand rollers to animate cut-paper images that weave together the natural and the bodily, implicating the visual economies of pornography and advertising. Dana Bell uses blind embossing to surface entwined figures drawn from vintage commercial photographs, giving new texture and ambiguity to found intimacy. Fanny Allié translates fabric collage onto handmade paper, producing images alive with half-legible creatures that hover at the edge of recognition. Her work Chapiteau evokes the theatrical world of the circus tent without fully resolving into it. Jia Sung draws on the figure of the krasue, a Southeast Asian mythological spirit that takes the form of a floating head trailing viscera, to explore girlhood as something luminous and grotesque in equal measure, the surrounding figures watching with an attention that sits somewhere between witness and worship.

Chakaia Booker's print hums with the same material obsessions as her sculpture, the curved tubular forms that ring the composition's border, unmistakably tire-derived, giving way to a dense interior of slashing black marks and flashes of yellow that feels simultaneously industrial and jubilant. Devraj Dakoji's The Wheel of Life populates its surface with figures, animals, birds, and wheels in a restless, stampeding accumulation that feels as ancient as cave painting and as urgent as a fever dream. A self-portrait by Molly Crabapple shows her cool and serene on a subway platform swarmed by rats and pigeons in party hats.

Together, the works presented here affirm printmaking as a practice that is, by its very nature, close to the ground. Rooted in physical contact between surface and material, in the pressure of the press, the grain of the wood, the bite of acid on metal, it is a medium that insists on proximity: to process, to history, to the body. Close to the Ground speaks not only to the earthward pull of many of the works and their stubborn attention to land, site, and material residue, but to printmaking itself as a way of knowing that cannot be separated from touch, from accumulation, from the irreducible intimacy of one surface meeting another.

EXHIBITION MATERIALS

PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST (PDF)