Rob Swainston mixes installation, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and video in an exploration of social and historical processes.  Because Swainston works large and in multiples he can cut up, overprint, combine, repeat and reassemble work in multiple ways.  He is constantly rebuilding and reassembling work while adding new components and destroying old.  For him, this process is analogous to how our social world is constructed.

Centennial Drift is an exploration of contemporary American political and social landscape 100 years after the ‘closing of the American frontier.’ The show consists of two components: a large woodblock Centennial and a video/print juxtaposition, Till Tomorrow On. When the American Western Frontier was declared ‘closed’ a century ago, the event was greeted with a certain unease among historians and political actors, stemming from a perception that the frontier served an important distraction from the political machinations of real power relations. Adrift in the ‘American Century’ that followed, the frontier has been replaced variously by global empire, mass media, consumerism, the cold war, the space race, the space age, and, more recently globalization and the digital frontier.

Centennial, a large woodblock print mural spanning three walls in the main gallery is a black and white print, derived from a jigsaw block of distressed, cut and reassembled plywood printed on heavy watercolor paper.  It acts as a vacant stage that once possessed the expansive hope of the American frontier and now has been reduced to an empty wall—a ‘post-landscape landscape’, at once evoking historiography, topography and cosmology.

The video/print installation, Till Tomorrow On, reveals the nature of the spectacle of political machinations, and the robust reproduction of power structures.  The departure point for Till Tomorrow On is a large 16th century multi-woodblock print by Albrecht Durer, Triumphal Arch.  The original print featured interchangeable panels in an architectural armature.  The panels, functioning as propaganda, could be removed, replaced, or relocated depending upon political necessity and imperial whim.  Swainston has redrawn, reconfigured, and updated Triumphal Arch positioned within the context of American Spectacle. 

Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Rob made his first relief print "Hippopotamus" at age five. He studied art and political science at Hampshire College in Amherst MA, and subsequently lived and worked in Central Europe, pursuing postgraduate studies in political science at Budapest’s Central European University. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2006 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Rob is a cofounder and master printer of Prints of Darkness, a collaborative printmaking studio in Brooklyn, NY. He has also worked as a master printer and taught printmaking at Columbia University. Rob is an alumnus of the Philadelphia art collective Vox Populi. He lives and works in New York City, where he is currently participating in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program.