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Offset, an exhibition curated by Matthew Spiegelman at Mount Tremper Arts, features the work of ten artists (including Spiegelman) who have created offset lithographic posters.

Offset printing is a common and inexpensive printing technique whereby an image is transferred (or "offset") from a plate to a rubber surface, and then to a printed surface. The majority of modern print media -- books, calendars, magazines, menus, newspapers and posters -- utilize this process.

Offset posters are sold in museum gift shops and on web sites, making reproductions of famous works of art affordable and accessible to anyone. Monet's "Waterlilies," Picasso's "Petite Fleurs" and Van Gogh's "Starry Night" are consistent best-selling images. They are tacked to college dormitory walls and used as wallpaper; hung side by side with college poster clichés -- John Belushi wearing his "College" sweatshirt, a list of rules for "Beer Pong," and the inevitable photograph of Bob Marley smoking the world's biggest joint. The works of art are appropriated, co-opted and re-contextualized. They are changed. They are made disposable. They are offset.

The exhibition is Spiegelman's experiment, designed to see what happens when artists seize this medium; when they question, appropriate and utilize the potential of offset printing in a different way; and when they make work to be produced (and reproduced) specifically as offset prints. And so while offset printing enables the mass reproduction of a preexisting image as an affordable print or poster, Spiegelman and the artists in Offset strive to do the opposite.

Upon entering Mount Tremper Arts' large, airy studio, one sees several posters for the show. It features small icons of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink droplets, and a group of circular shapes that allude to rollers of the offset press. The poster seems to say, "I am offset," and several of the posters are hung side by side, in a line of identical images.

Poster by Olaf Breuning, photo by Matthew Spiegelman

Facing the exhibition posters is a piece by Olaf Breuning, perhaps the best-known artist in the show. Breuning's image incorporates a few familiar elements of his varied visual vocabulary -- body decoration/transformation (in this instance, via face painting) and "color study" (the faces are painted black, and a series of mostly primary colors).

While Breuning's piece is displayed as a single poster, as one moves into the exhibition space, it is immediately clear that most of the artists' works are displayed as multiples, and hung in ways that acknowledge and play with the conventional ways and methods of printing and hanging such objects. The show seems to celebrate, embrace and exploit the inherently multiplicitous nature of the offset process.

posters by Michele O'Marah, photo by Matthew Spiegelman

Michele O'Marah, whose work deals with appropriation and re-representation of popular culture, appropriates a David Lachapelle photograph of Pamela Anderson, breaks it into a black-and-white dot matrix/halftone pattern, flips it on its side, and covers it in a "Never Mind the Bollocks" ransom-note text. A line of the posters is wheat-pasted to the wall.

Rachel Mason is a performance artist who re-represents political culture; she writes songs from the point-of-view of political figures and then performs those songs dressed as the people. Her poster shows a grid of political figurines alongside some of her past impersonations. Fabian Marti's poster is the impersonation of a museum shop poster. It includes a reproduction of one of the artist's pre-existing works, with a facsimile of the artist's signature directly below the image for effect, and the poster is hung like a scroll, between two metal rods. One cannot help but ponder the preciousness and value of a rare object or signature once it is mass-produced.

Posters by Mamiko Otsubo, photo by Matthew Spiegelman

One of the most interesting pieces of the show is Mamiko Otsubo's grid of four posters. Each poster is the same image -- an abstract composition of black, intersecting diagonal lines on a white background. The image itself is nice, and very nicely composed, but Otsubo has taken the image beyond the surface of the paper. Each of the posters has shapes cut out from it. Some of the shapes remain attached, and droop down from the surface. One of the shapes has been removed completely and reattached elsewhere. And there are several small, round, colorful pushpins placed directly within the image, pushed right through the poster.

posters by Nancy de Holl, photo by Matthew Spiegelman

Nancy de Holl's image shares a few basic features with Breuning's, in that it includes face painting and wonderful color. It's the image of a woman, down on all fours (knees and elbows), on a sheet of white seamless paper. She is clothed, but her exposed skin is painted a glittering gold, and her face is painted a tribal black and white. Her backside is raised in the air, and her back is covered by what appears to be a green heating pad, with a white cord dangling down to the ground beside her. This image is enclosed in the shape of a heart on a matching scribbled green canvas. It's a strangely captivating image. Hung in a set of two posters, side by side, this presentation feels just right for the shapes contained within the image.

Works by Michael Rashkow, Michael Queenland and Martha Friedman include prominent diamond shapes and/or diagonal lines, and play with pattern. Rashkow includes the image of a cyclist enclosed in a diamond, masked off and surrounded by heavy, brushed swaths of deep red color, and hung in a continuous row of three posters, as if in motion. Queenland, at first glance, appears to have made four small posters, but in fact it is two pairs of two different images, slightly offset from one another and printed on a single poster sheet. His humorously inventive layered photographic images include people working out, balloon animals and a person wearing a ghost costume. Friedman has made an overhead close-up image of a dirty waffle iron, tilted at a 45-degree angle. Queenland's image includes some internal tiling of smaller images, while the diagonal lines of Friedman's poster enable copies of it to be tiled across a wall, as it is here.

posters by Mamiko Ostubo and Matthew Spiegelman, photo by Matthew Spiegelman

Lastly, Spiegelman's work is the mysterious image of a darkened window at night, framed in glowing pink neon, with a pair of eyes hovering in the middle -- staring out, directly at the viewer. The eyes are applied to the poster via inkjet printer. The poster is flanked by two smaller posters showing faint, blue-grey gradients by Mamiko Otsubo; hung in different orientations that are 180 degrees opposite of each other. They form a visual yin and yang around the eyes' unwavering stare.

Offset is a successful experiment, and Spiegelman has expressed his interest in continuing the experiment by inviting other artists to participate, and exhibiting the work in other venues.

Each of the posters in the Mount Tremper Arts exhibition has been printed in a small limited edition run and is available for purchase through Mount Tremper Arts for $100, while supplies last.

Christian Patterson is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He has participated in two Mt. Tremper Arts exhibitions. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, and his first monograph, Sound Affects, was published in 2008.