Lithographs and Cyanotypes
June 8, 2026 – August 3, 2026
Tom Christison is a printmaker whose work is inspired by personal experiences, observations, and an attentiveness to cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration. These ideas inform the work as Christison creates complex layered works with texture and photographic images. At the center of the work there is a tension between attraction and unease. He is interested in images that draw viewers in through beauty, color, and visual abundance, that also reveal systems of consumption, transformation, and loss. His visual vocabulary draws from contemporary artist prints, Mexican retablos, Polish folk art, children’s toys, food packaging, natural history collections, and the material residue of everyday life. The works in this exhibition highlight moments of transition, allowing for the work to embrace the contradictions of discomfort and wonder.
Christison writes, “I photograph demolition sites as buildings are torn down, when the hidden interior life of a structure is exposed before its final erasure. The resulting images resemble archaeological cross-sections in which layers of cultural memory, ornament, debris, and biological forms emerge in chaotic relation to one another. They function as records of accumulation and disappearance, tracing what has been built, inhabited, consumed, abandoned, and ultimately obscured. These works are constructed through hand-drawn lithography, monotype, cyanotype, screenprint, latex paint, and photographic imagery. Each work is entirely unique, built image by image and texture by texture, often moving through the press twenty or more times.”
Tom is a faculty member at the University of Iowa where he teaches the Introduction to Printmaking, Lithography, and Monoprinting courses. He maintains Sandhill Press, his private print studio in Iowa City, Iowa. He has taught and led workshops at institutions including McNeese State University, Ohio University, the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, and Coe College, and has served as Master Printmaker in Residence at the Robert Blackburn Print Workshop in New York City.
