Randy Bolton: The Role of Research in Contemporary Art Practice Thursday, November 7, 7:00 PM, Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave - FREE! Join us at the Tacoma Art Museum for a lecture by renowned printmaker Randy Bolton about the role of research in contemporary art practice. Bolton will define the two models of traditional research in academia, then suggest a third model that fits his personal thirty-year experiences as a teacher and studio artists. He will speak about the development of his work and highlight his most recent series of sculptural prints. Bolton's work is on display in the Kittredge Gallery on the University of Puget Sound campus through November 9. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Randy Bolton teaches at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he has been head of the print media department since 2002. Bolton's work is characterized by an exploration of images that seem familiar and comforting on first glance, but become strange and disturbing on further consideration. His prints borrow from and adapt the nostalgia-evolving illustrations of early children's books and science texts. In their original contexts these pictures served as visual tools to help educate young minds about acceptable morals and beliefs. In his work, however, Bolton has reclaimed these illustrations with a more subversive intent. By digitally altering and recombining fragments of these old illustrations, new meanings are suggested in which an undercurrent of uncertainty or apprehension undermines the initial flash of familiarity and comfort. Images originally intended to reflect childhood security and innocence become ironic metaphors of a chaotic world that is threatened by forces beyond our true comprehension and control. Bolton's work is about the power these illustrations have in shaping our view of the world as children, following by the disillusionment that occurs when these images fail us as adults. Despite the seemingly amusing quality of the images he employs, there is an element of concern in Bolton's work and a vague feeling that the valuable things in life are in jeopardy. Prior to his time at Cranbook, Bolton was professor of art at the University of Delaware. He received his B.F.A. from University of North Texas and his M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. He has taught at institutions across the country, including four years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Laura Edgar | Art Department Assistant and Curator, Abby Williams Hill Collection UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND 1500 N. Warner St. #1072 Tacoma, WA 98416-1072 T: 253.879.2806 pugetsound.edu/art