Kyung Eun You and Douglas Collins “Every Force Evolves a Form”

Blackburn 20|20

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Each artist works in the sensual severity of the black of black ink and the white of white paper, in the service of uncompromising obsessions that cannot be named but only shown.

Kyung Eun You portrays scenes from lingering memories of a difficult childhood, using the implacable repetition of linocut frames to push the story. The images run forward then backward like a filmstrip, until their power is wrung out in a cry of exhaustion. It is like a book, but a strange and cruel one, where the end is the beginning and the beginning the end. Maybe it is not a book after all but a nightmarish house of mirrors.

Douglas Collins also outlines a narrative but one caught obliquely, just at a moment of time, leading perhaps to a place which could be everywhere or nowhere, among objects that are brooding presences of his own invention. Defiant, exacting, they seem to hint at stories but give nothing away. The aquatints and mezzotints are rich as molasses, the whites mottled and ancient, their meaning as ambiguous as ruins.

Both artists have both shown at the International Print Center New York among many other venues nationwide.