reviews > Normal, IL

Dylan Yvonne Welch
Dylan Yvonne Welch

Geometric shapes are not typically considered a bastion of personal memory, but the stacked, opened-out cubes in Dylan Yvonne Welch’s prints take me back to the video arcade of my mid-80s youth, where I loved to play Q*bert. (I dug Ms. Pac-Man too, but that’s for another review.) Welch’s patterned planes conjure other associations: salami slices, outer space, clouds made of gods’ fingerprints, the building blocks of life. Her compositions are playful and weird, qualities achieved at least in part through Welch’s decidedly contemporary take on the ancient process of etching: after creating her plates, she scans them into a computer then rearranges, multiplies, enlarges, squeezes and flips them before outputting the final arrangement on an inkjet printer. Concerned about the demise of traditional printing methods, as we fret about the disappearance of print in general? Don’t worry—it’s all on paper.

—Lori Waxman 3/25/16 11:46 AM