Beyond the Meadow, Before Time
INTRODUCTION
Eugenie Torgerson’s work is rooted in her love for process and experimentation, whether she’s using hand tools or the latest digital technology, and in her interest in migration—newcomers’ claims on the land, the land’s claims upon them.
Torgerson makes two-dimensional digital composites and a variety of book objects at her studio in a former elementary school in rural southwestern Michigan. For the composites, she uses a scanner and Photoshop to combine photographs or her own pastels with old plat maps, manipulating the color and transparency of the layers to come up with a final image.
“For the most part, my images are not of a specific site but are generalized and universal representations of the weight of the land and the energy and allure of the horizon,” she says. “I am interested in migrations in general—what makes people decide to leave, what causes them to stay, how they endure with grace.”
Some of the images here are printed on steel plates with a technique that involves coating a very thin sheet of steel with acrylic medium (unpigmented acrylic paint used as an adhesive) and multiple coats of white acrylic paint and white inkAID (a product that makes virtually any surface receptive to inkjet ink) before printing. Her book objects, such as From One Place to Another (back cover), bring together digital image-making with box-and-book construction.
Eugenie Torgerson has a BA with honors in printmaking from Northwestern University. For more than thirty years she has exhibited at art festivals nationwide, most recently in Chicago, Denver, and the Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington, DC. Her work is in a number of corporate collections and is variously represented by Olson Larsen Galleries in West Des Moines, Iowa; Priscilla Juvelis Rare Books in Kennebunkport, Maine; Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore; and Tappan Z Gallery in Tarrytown, New York.
M.W.
