T E R E S A C O L E reception june 5th 6–9 pm

TRANSFER With their multiple layers of richly allusive, cross-­cultural imagery, Teresa Cole’s prints uncover missing links between

pattern and meaning, ornamentation and narrative. They occupy a rare common ground between visual seduction

and conceptual engagement, employing innovative techniques and lush iconography to explore the commonalities

of human experience. The installation, screen prints, and woodcut relief prints on paper and fabric that make up the

artist’s Gallery Bienvenu exhibition draw inspiration from her trips to India to research the origins of pattern.

eye-­opening wonder of traveling to foreign lands. “In art,” Cole observes, “we use pattern, but very often its meaning

is lost. It might allude to identity, but it’s rarely clear what a given pattern actually means. In Indian culture, there are

narratives that are so well known that they have become pattern.”

A professor of printmaking at Tulane University, Cole has seen her works exhibited and collected in galleries and

museums around the globe. The works are renowned for their virtuosic graphic sophistication, which, upon closer

inspection, rewards the viewer with an intense texturality and translucence arising from the layering of inks, cut papers,

and fabrics. Some of Cole’s prints resplend with silver leaf on tarlatan fabric, an unusual integration of media blending

Indian traditions and Western printmaking techniques. In these works, as across her output, she acts as a transferrer of

optical effects and the cultural coding embedded within them. This essentially syntactical enterprise, in Cole’s hands,

is never less than visually ravishing, a testament to the crux of her thesis: that mark-­making and meaning are one and

the same. Richard Speer

Front Cover: Excavation I, unique relief print on paper, 48” x 84”, 2009

exhibition dates: june 3rd -­ july 22nd, 2010reception: june 5th 6–9 pm

Untitled Pattern V, relief print on paper, 39” x 60”, 2010

CC 24/7 Installation (detail 4), screen and relief print on cut paper, 24” x 18”, 2008

CC 24/7 Installation (detail 1), screen and relief print on cut paper, 24” x 18”, 2008

Untitled Pattern III, relief print on paper, 44” x 90”, 2010

CC 24/7 Installation (detail 3)screen and relief print on cut paper, 22” x 24”, 2008

518 JULIA STREET, NEW ORLEANS, LA 70130

ARTWORK © TERESA COLE 2010CATALOG © GALLERY BIENVENU 2010PHOTOS BY MIKE SMITH

504.525.0518 www.gallerybienvenu.com

Serpentine (detail) relief print on hand dyed tarlatan and paper, 95” x 36” x 6”