Woody Vasulka produced prints during his two separate residencies at iea in 2001 and 2009. Vasulka studied at The School of Industrial Engineering and The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague before emigrating to the US in 1965. He was a 1979 Guggenheim Fellow and resided in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His individual works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the International Center of Photography, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York. Vasulka produced prints during his two separate residencies at the iea.

For his 2009 residency Vasulka worked on another series of large prints entitled Lucifer’s Commission. The images came from glass plate negatives of circuit boards that were cast off during weapons development at Los Alamos National Laboratories and picked up as surplus. They were then buried for a number of years and left out to weather in the Sante Fe desert. The plates were scanned using the EverSmart Scanner at a very high resolution and then processed to produce the prints. This series has a haunting quality. Artifacts of our great technical advance, when left to nature and organic process seem to take on a sinister wit. The Lucifer’s Commission prints engage Vasulka’s adventure within the attraction and repulsion of two poles, one visionary romanticism and the other cerebral, rational abstraction.

Waveform Iris Prints, 2001

Vasulka signing Waveform Iris Print.