Professor and Alumnus Nathan Catlin '12 Featured at Centre for Contemporary Printmaking
Adjunct Assistant Professor and Master Printer at the Neiman Center for Print Studies, Nathan Catlin '12 is featured in COMFORT/(DIS)COMFORT at the Centre for Contemporary Printmaking in Norfolk, CT. This show will be on view until October 23, 2021.
The exhibit centers the COVID-19 pandemic and how it affects our quotidian life and relationships. Importantly, it focuses on “individuals [who] suddenly find themselves choosing between remaining within the isolated space of their own homes or going out into the world and newly considering their own physicality in it and that of the people they encounter.” The gallery “brings together work demonstrating these junctions of unease, the inward and outward expressions of emotional responses to this new relationship with people, how we see ourselves and others, and the convoluted attempts to rationalize that which is irrational or otherwise incomprehensible.”
In Catlin’s work, we see the intricate and time-consuming process of the linocut at work. This manual procedure speaks to the temporality of the pandemic and how relationships to time shifted as various obligations fell away. Thematically, these prints show domestic scenes. For example, Bathroom Haircuts (2021) captures the relatable experience of having a friend with no cosmetology background cut your hair because barber shops were closed. In capturing this small moment, Catlin immortalizes the everyday strangeness of living through this moment in history.
Squeeze (2021) depicts a scene that was alien to many people’s pandemic experience—a hug. The print speaks to the longing and desire for human contact during these times. By including a close-up vision of this moment where the viewer mostly makes out the back of one subject and the hand of the other, Catlin universalizes this need for touch.
Catlin received his BFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2012. His work has been shown nationally and internationally and is represented by Davidson Gallery in NYC.
