Prints
Monica d. Church’s photo-based work relies on incident and specificity. By selecting specimens from twentieth-century amateur photographs, enlarging and re-contextualizing them she addresses the lines between beauty, science, and voyeurism. Viewers may have a visceral reaction to the Circles of Desire causing them to believe just for as moment that they are looking at something unknown or from the more distant past such as Ingres’s Turkish Bath rather than an image from the mid twentieth century.
In 2005, Church received a fellowship award for a six-week artist’s residency at the Woman’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY where she returned to printmaking after a twenty-year hiatus. In this new work, Church is melding an ancient print form— etching, with modern technology. She scans in family Kodachrome slides from the 1950s, uses a computer to mine a digital image, and then creates a photopolymer plate. This plate is then printed in the traditional manner, wiped by hand, and pulled through a press. The Suite de Nus & Of Mirror and Eye series are small editions of five – ten. Each circular image has both a circular embossing and an outer rectangular embossing. These are on-going bodies of work.