Magenta Research Collective’s “Pressure Points” collaborative exhibition is focused on engaging in a dialogue about the boundaries of print as material and the matrix itself as a critical matter to explore how the body, materiality, connection, and touch intersect. The work the collective presents is research-generated and reflective of critical concerns of print practice in the 21st century.

“Pressure Points” demonstrates the range of materials and approaches artists of the Magenta Research Collective have employed to express women’s experiences. Ranging from figurative to abstract and experimental work, the exhibition examines the evolving perspectives of femininity and feminism. It explores how the actions and tensions inherent in printmaking—its impact and the traces it leaves—reflect broader cultural pressures on the body, particularly the bodies of female-identifying people. This collective show highlights the diverse ways female printmakers engage with their bodies, materials, and the act of creation to explore interconnected concepts of the body through expanded and experimental
printmaking techniques.

The collective’s artists engage the body in their work as an active participant in the process of making, examining the societal biases and objectification of the body through personal and collective narratives. MRC considers the print matrix in all its connotations and potentials: as signal and noise, feminine reproductivity, agent and agentic force, and technological and bodily form. The collective re/structures the matrix, moving beyond its traditional use to create new forms of knowledge, using the pressure, trace, and intensity of the etching press and the digital glitch to reflect on how culture inscribes coloniality onto the surface of the body. Their works focus on the pressure points of embodiment and power. Magenta Research Collective extends print through installation and experimentation. The collective’s artists engage the body in their work as an active participant in the process of making, examining the societal biases and objectification of the body through personal and collective narratives. MRC considers the print matrix in all its connotations and potentials: as signal and noise, feminine reproductivity, agent and agentic force, and technological and bodily well as their responses (“adverse reactions”).

Fungai Marima uses her own body to record the pressures on Indigenous people and people of color, embodying relations within the colonial architectures of our global world.

Meanwhile, Carolyn Craig performs the affective traces of an Othered woman, using performative trace acts in the studio. Her work considers embodied relations to systems of power and the state of the ‘failed’ citizen in terms of moral worth and meritocratic regimes. In her work, Carolyn uses performance and its archives to produce artifacts that engage with para-feminist modes of critique and parody. 

Katy Drake‘s work explores transgressions of the (meta)physical boundaries of the body and their resonances. Her work presents documentation of spatially engaged print practices as well as traditional print modes within an archive. 

Isidora Papadouli approaches the Pressure Point as a metaphor; she examines how the surface of the body carries traces of social injustice and bias. The visual elements in her prints are incorporated from such a close distance that sex and ethnicity cannot be readily identified in the images. 

Irena Keckes investigates the limitless, boundless, immense, indefinite, and unrestrained nature of feminine energy through her cycle of prints,
“Spheres.” The sphere, a shape composed of infinite points, a shape with no beginning or end, symbolizes wholeness, unity, balance, harmony, and infinity. It represents a perfect, unbroken, and balanced form, as part of her highly contemporized installation practice. 

Martyna Rzepecka uses her body directly to draw on graphic matrices. She explores a woman’s power and how the female body changes throughout life. Her linocuts are the armors she wears in different parts of a woman’s life—as an artist, an employee, or a lover. 

Meanwhile, Katarzyna Zimna refers to the ongoing cultural, religious, and political conflicts and pressures affecting women’s bodies, as “Pressure
Points” explores how the actions and tensions inherent in printmaking, along with its impact and the traces it leaves, reflect broader cultural pressures on the body, particularly the bodies of female-identifying people. This collective show highlights the diverse ways female printmakers engage with their bodies, materials, and the act of creation. The works explore interconnected concepts of the body through expanded and experimental printmaking techniques.