When a group of printmakers first approached Jose Tence Ruiz to curate “Analog Playground,” they knew what they wanted: a group exhibition that would extend the printmaking process into new territory. The show, which opened on October 19, is Ateneo Art Gallery’s offering for the annual ‘Zero-in’ series, in which contemporary artists create works in response to the practice of private museums of having permanent collections.

Ruiz, himself an accomplished digital artist, called them “besieged printmakers in a digital age.” Cutting away wood, rubber, or stone, manually applying wax, acid, and ink to metal plates, the process of printmaking goes back to the earliest centuries, when cavemen scratched animal shapes on stone walls. Now, everything from transportation to communication has been digitalized, but many everyday activities, such as what we eat, or what we wear, are not. According to Ruiz, “Our life is still primarily analog,” a description of things pre- or non-digital.

“Analog Playground”’s nine artists glorify printmaking, an old-school medium. But they also hope to expand printmaking’s physical and conceptual boundaries to prevent it from becoming obsolete. It’s a choice of “extension versus extinction,” said Ruiz.

Despite the serious tone of the exhibit, Ruiz intended it to be fun—with a lot of innovation and irreverence. The first thing that greets viewers in the gallery is a “security guard” in a carved woodblock by versatile artist Virgilio “Pandi” Aviado. Then there are the series of silkscreens by social realist Pablo Baen Santos. The works are based on his own “Krista,” a painting of a woman bound around the mouth with barbed wire, done in 1984, the year after Ninoy Aquino’s assassination. Santos used wide-mesh wire screens instead of fine silkscreens, to “print” on canvas, allowing a thick, messy layer of paint to leak through. Titled “Wire Tapping Series,” the piece’s fusion of political commentary, artistic reference, and material seems appropriately barbed.

Crucial to the show’s identity was the collaborative spirit of the artists. Ruiz saw his role in the exhibition as that of an “agitator,” prodding the printmakers to reach beyond traditional techniques, or to focus their concepts.

Some pieces personalize the printmaker, such as Sid Gomez Hildawa’s installation, “Xerox of Your Smile Revisited,” which is a coffee drinker’s diary: two-month’s worth of Styrofoam cups “printed” with the artist’s teeth marks.

Others challenge the traditional display of the print, choosing to see the original plate as an art object in itself: Eugene Jarque’s richly textured “Undecided,” a series of metal plates etched with acid, and Marina Cruz’s “Reified Recurrence,” in which both the sunken cast and relief print of a baptismal gown are shown side-by-side. Pieces by Benjie Torrado Cabrera and Aviado use light to extend the reach of printmaking; Aviado used black lights to make woodcuts glow in opposite relief; and Cabrera projected light through etched, transparent acrylic sheets to create a shadow of the print on the wall.

In “Kitschen,” a tiled kitchen and toilet area covered in decals (a form of print and transfer) cropped from Internet photographs of Ateneo’s painting collection, Ambien Roldan juxtaposed the sacredness of art with the ordinariness of life and vice versa. Meanwhile, Ambie Abaño rejected printmaking’s history of reproduction by printing identical rubbercut portraits on spandex. When stretched across blobby, two-dimensional shapes, each portrait took on a startlingly individual expression.

“Process is an integral part of the enjoyment of the show itself,” said Ruiz. While this might be the artists’ intention, the focus on the printmaking process itself rather than an outside concept means the exhibit can feel like a series of joyfully self-referential exercises: printmakers think about printmaking through printmaking. It is meta-meta-art.

Archaeologist and glass artist Noell El Farol took the forensic route to printmaking with “Software” when he lifted fingerprints from Ramon Orlina’s “Athena,” an elegant, charismatic glass sculpture. Each print was enlarged and sandblasted onto a Petri-like glass dish, set inside a wooden index box so that it resembled a research artifact, or piece of evidence. He labeled each box with excerpts from Fingerprints and Palmar Dermatoglyphics—an entertaining tract that analyzes personal characteristics based on finger and palm prints. Gems include such claims as, “The whorl is a mark of an individualist.”

Whimsical and fresh, the piece asks the viewer to draw conclusions about the audience that viewed Orlina’s work, connecting the present audience with a previous community of art patrons.

The printmakers have imbued a postmodern spirit in the most archaic—and now, most innovative—of forms.

“ANALOG PLAYGROUND” will be on display at the Ateneo Art Gallery until January 20, 2006.

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