SEASON 5 – 2020
RL Tillman – Union Down
October 1 – 31, 2020
These golfing pants, or a similar pair, were once seen covering the hide of a President’s golfing companion. Hung from a flag pole, they present a signal of dire distress, a lament for a country allowed to fall free, a living thing destroyed in an undignified way.
RL Tillman’s creative work explores the aesthetic of our built environment and the graphic tools we use to communicate. In particular, Tillman’s work explores the frequent failure of these tools: graphics, street markings, and business forms that are wholly unsuited to the function they were designed to perform. These failed attempts to communicate graphically present a poignant metaphor for our struggle to communicate with others at the interpersonal level. This metaphor fashions the conceptual and formal ethic behind the artist’s work as he manipulates the visual culture of our time: twisting and tweaking contemporary graphic language to explore issues in society, politics, and culture.
R.L. Tillman is a member of the full-time faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art, where he teaches courses in the practice and history of printmaking.
R.L. has exhibited his art throughout the US at sites including the Baltimore Museum of Art and the St. Louis Center of Contemporary Art. Internationally, he has been an invited participant at the Tallinn Print Triennial and the IMPACT Print Conference. He has been a Guest Artist at many educational institutions, including The Rhode Island School of Design and The University of Pennsylvania. He has served on the Board of Directors of SGCI International.
He co-founded the award-winning website www.printeresting.org, where along with his fellow editors, he produced several exhibitions and publications about contemporary print practice.
R.L. received an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa.