Artificial Insanity and the Urge to Walk All Night: Montlack and Engler at HEDGE

Rita Montlack and Meryl Engler both work in print media, and the artists are presented as such at HEDGE Gallery, but they could hardly be more different. Montlack’s work is digital, while Engler’s is 100 percent analog; Montlack’s photo-based works are fully chromatic; Engler’s relief prints sometimes use just one color, and even the multi-color prints have a palate limited by the process; Montlack lampoons artificial intelligence and embraces the noise and energy of modern life, while Engler goes for the peace of the natural world. But in two separately titled shows merged and on view together, they share HEDGE Gallery like skilled drivers in traffic at rush hour. Rita Montlack’s AI: Artificial Insanity and Meryl Engler’s The Urge to Walk All Night are on view March 19 through April 26.

What makes them work together is the contrast, and the fact that each is strong and can stand on its own. Further, they are hung in a way that fits the HEDGE walls and spaces as if they were tailor made for each other. Engler’s larger works hold their walls alone; Montlack’s smaller ones are grouped in installations proportionally so that even though they are for sale individually, they read together as a coherent whole. Engler’s peaceful hues are a formidable counterpoint to Montlack’s shouting color.

The most striking effect of installation is Montlack’s Patterns of Behavior, a series of 42 numbered prints arrayed in a tight matrix of seven rows and six columns. The patterns of behavior are all embodied in adjectives—Petty, Brainy, Sneaky, Thrifty, Feisty, Flashy, Stormy, and 36 others. The glowing texts are collaged in relevant contexts, many featuring images of women, some with relevant objects (such as “thrifty” against a background of jumbled pennies) all in technicolor. Individually, each of those words and pieces has its personality, and could be read as a description of an individual. In that way they are witty, perhaps sweet and affectionate. Grouped together, though, they become darker–a larger commentary on the way humans assess and categorize each other. These are definitely stronger together.

Montlack says in her practice she originally used all her own photos, combining and manipulating them with filters and text. Over time she also began to integrate other people’s photos, even screen shots from her computer. Her unmistakable chromatic palate has no bounds. It’s shamelessly gaudy, with neon shades used not just to call attention, but to embody playfulness, too.

In another large installation of multiple works—29 of them–Montlack’s individual pieces use technology to skewer technology. Each of them is its own concoction, with ingredients from the modern world, including Ritalin, existential questions like “what if everything was real?”, the Artificial Intelligence-enabled, interactive art installation The Band, by the collective FriendsWithYou (on view now at Cleveland Public Library’s Brett Hall), and landscapes surreally colored so that they read like a dystopian world. One of the prints reminds us that “All You Need Is Love.” Another riffs on the initials, echoing the title of the show: Artificial Insanity. All together, they spell out “HI AI.” It’s here, folks. This is your life.

Meryl Engler is a relief printmaker, originally from California, now living and working in Akron, Ohio. In this show it’s easy to see—and in fact you can’t miss–her impressive skill with a number of the discipline’s techniques. The largest of her prints here are mostly one-color, floor to ceiling impressions made from a single large block, titled When I Become A Tree. A woodcutter will immediately recognize the finesse of the lines carved in all directions—which is a clue that these are not carved into plywood or the plank side of a board, but into MDF—which has no grain and therefore allows for carving in all directions without what one beloved local woodcutter calls “negotiation.” The large lines are the branches and twigs growing from still larger trunks of the trees which seem to have been cut, but the new growth keeps coming. The lines are natural and graceful. Engler says she started the image from a photo, but that once the larger lines and composition were in place, she drew the rest—the huge accumulation of leaves and fine lines–herself.

Because the block for the When I Become a Tree series is larger than the width of available paper, it’s printed repeatedly, with each sheet/each print cropping different sections of the block, making distinctive, related prints—one in Green, one in Gold, and another in a blue-green shade she calls Mint. These are printed not with a press or a steamroller, but by rubbing by hand with a barren for hours. The investment of time in each of these makes an easy connection with its title: Engler has lived with the process of making this block literally for years, and with each impression for several hours. No doubt in the midst of that work she could feel herself becoming the tree.

Another vein of Engler’s work is reduction woodcuts, printed with layers of transparent ink. Her piece Warm Light shows a man at the perimeter of a bonfire, the bonfire in a clearing surrounded by mature trees. Engler captures the life of the fire in lines and nuances of the flames, and in the tumult of sparks rising skyward, towering above the man. It’s beautiful carving, but the brilliance of this one is in the inking that makes the glow of the fire. Engler created a fade of the transparent orange and yellow, inking by hand and moving the brayer side to side so that the color is more dense and intense closer to the heart of the flame, and gradually fades as it falls outside those bounds onto the surrounding trees and glowing on the face and body of the man. The glow has no hard edge, and that’s cool.

AI: Artificial Insanity featuring Rita Montlack & The Urge to Walk All Night featuring Meryl Engler are on view March 19 through April 26 at HEDGE Gallery, including for a Third Friday reception April 18.