Randy Bolton

* consigned work

Born in Dallas, TX in 1956, Randy Bolton received a BFA from the University of North Texas in 1978 and a MFA from the Ohio State University in 1982. Bolton has taught in many visiting artist positions across the country, including four years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1989-2002, Bolton was a Professor of Art and Printmaking Area Coordinator at the University of Delaware. In 2002, Bolton was appointed Head of the Print Media Department and Artist in Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Bolton’s work has been widely exhibited in one-person, invitational and juried shows since 1982. Recent one-person exhibitions include “Twice-Told Tales” at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan, "Things Are Rarely What They Seem" and “Chase, Tumble, Slide” at Schmidt/Dean Gallery in Philadelphia, "Books of Nonsense" at Evergreen House in Baltimore, MD, and “Two Sides to Every Story” at Littlejohn Contemporary in New York. Recent group exhibitions include “New Prints 2008/Summer: Artists’ Commentary” at the International Print Center New York, NY; “I’d Rather Be Drawing” at the Dennis Morgan Gallery in Kansas City, MO; "New Prints 2004/Spring" at the International Print Center New York, NY; "Popular, Pop & Post-Pop: Color Screenprints, 1930s to Now" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; "Look Out" at Revolution Gallery in Ferndale, MI, “Digital: Printmaking Now” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; "Sculptural Prints" and “Digital Press: Artists Exploring New Technologies” at the Print Center in Philadelphia, PA and “Sight/Insight” at the New York Public Library. Bolton has completed artist residencies at the Frans Masereel Center in Kasterlee, Belgium; the Evergreen House in Baltimore, MD; the MacDowell Art Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Bolton’s prints are in many corporate and museum collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts – Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Public Library. Bolton received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in 2000, an Art Matters Fellowship (NYC) in 1996 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1989.

Bolton’s work is characterized by an exploration of images that seem familiar and comforting on first glance, but become strange and disturbing on further consideration. His prints borrow from and adapt the nostalgia-evolving illustrations of early children’s books and science texts. In their original contexts these pictures served as visual tools to help educate young minds about acceptable morals and beliefs. In his work, however, Bolton has reclaimed these illustrations with a more subversive intent. By digitally altering and recombining fragments of these old illustrations, new meanings are suggested in which an undercurrent of uncertainty or apprehension undermines the initial flash of familiarity and comfort. Images originally intended to reflect childhood security and innocence become ironic metaphors of a chaotic world that is threatened by forces beyond our true comprehension and control. Bolton’s work is about the power these illustrations have in shaping our view of the world as children, followed by the disillusionment that occurs when these images fail us as adults. Despite the seemingly amusing or flippant quality of the images he employs, there is an element of concern in Bolton’s work and a vague feeling that the valuable things in life are in jeopardy.

ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINTS II (NATURA MORTA)

In late 2020, Bolton began publishing an ongoing series of archival pigment print editions on paper made during this disruptive period of post-truth spectacle and alternative facts — an unreal time when the lines between truth vs. fiction and the fake vs. the real have become permanently erased.

As in his previous print-based work, these new archival pigment prints are derived from digitally altered iPhone photographs. Selected from his NATURA MORTA series, these most recent prints from 2022 begin with in-studio snapshots of still-life tableaus arranged from an assortment of household objects including the handmade, cast-object multiples (stumps, logs, broken branches, boards, bricks, traffic cones, packing peanuts, etc.) that Bolton used in his earlier large-scale, sculptural print installations.

In making this new series of archival pigment prints, Bolton has developed an all-digital working process. After the initial iPhone photos are uploaded, they are then deconstructed and reassembled to make new images that bear an uncanny resemblance to real life. Unlike the photomechanical halftone dot pattern that was used as a mediating screen in Bolton’s earlier screenprints and large-scale banners, these new archival pigment prints display their purely digital origins and means of production through applied layers of glitch filter effects that introduce chance and random RGB shifts, shakes, slices, scan lines, double exposures, and distortions. Resembling printouts of corrupted digital files, these new prints operate more in the realm of the hyper-real, but they retain much of their verisimilitude as photo-based, representational images — a holdover, perhaps, from a time when photography was considered to be an index or a document of reality.