TONIC: On Contact, Circulation, and Learning in Public, at Zygote Press

“There is a difference between speaking about and speaking nearby.” — Trinh T. Minh-ha
“I’m interested in what happens when language fails.”– Glenn Ligon

TONIC unfolds as a condition rather than a conclusion. Presented by Zygote Press, the exhibition brings together the 2025 PROOF Fellowship cohort: six Northeast Ohio artists engaging printmaking as a site of encounter, recalibration, and pressure. Print is approached not as a fixed mastery but as a collective of methods entered from multiple directions, carrying varying degrees of familiarity, curiosity, and resistance.

Launched in 2021, the PROOF Fellowship operates through sustained access rather than instruction alone. Artists work within a shared studio environment where learning emerges through repetition, observation, and exchange. The exhibition reflects this structure, holding distinct practices side by side, and what emerges instead is a shared attentiveness to process and ritual. Across the exhibition, printmaking functions simultaneously: supporting, unsettling, and reorienting each artist’s practice.

Arfil Pajarillaga extends his analog photographic approach into printmaking through an attention to environment and duration, translating everyday scenes into images shaped by quiet observation and contingency. Briana Robinson draws from a background in visual communication design, using print to negotiate systems of legibility, where graphic clarity meets material interruption. Erykah Townsend approaches everything conceptually, drawing from pop culture to circulate humor and critique through characters, icons, and familiar objects that carry altered density.

Jazzee Rozier integrates printmaking into an interdisciplinary practice that includes drawing, sewing, poetry, and photography. Their work positions the printed image as both trace and connective tissue, holding personal reflection alongside communal access. Kalia Horner brings figuration, textile collage, and printmaking together to surface-layered negotiations of cultural heritage, identity, and sexuality, allowing materials to carry memory alongside form. Monique Biggers approaches print through abstraction, engaging negative space as an active force and treating presence and absence as co-constitutive rather than oppositional.

Opening from 6 to 9 pm on April 10 with a public artist reception, TONIC marks a moment of visibility within an ongoing system—one that understands printmaking as a social practice shaped by repetition, proximity, and shared labor.

ZYGOTE PRESS
1410 East 30th Street
Cleveland, Ohio 44114
zygotepress.org
216.621.2900

EVENTS:

TONIC: 2025 PROOF Fellowship exhibit, opening April 10. Opening reception 6-9pm Friday, April 10