Jason Meadows

A portrait of the Los Angeles–based sculptor Jason Meadows, transposed by Andrea G. Artz from a photographic source into mokuhanga. Meadows works in welded steel and assemblage, building schematic three-dimensional constructions from flat planes — a sensibility that resonates with Artz's own practice of folding and constructing photographic surfaces into paper objects. Like her other portrait prints, this image likely isolates the head or upper body against a neutral field, reducing the photographic source to a small palette of inked layers carved into separate blocks. The mokuhanga method she uses depends on water-based pigments brushed onto shina plywood and pressed onto dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren), with [kento](/glossary/kento) registration aligning each successive impression. Where a photograph would carry continuous tone, the woodblock translation breaks the face into discrete color shapes joined by [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) transitions. The print fits within Artz's wider series of portraits of contemporary cultural figures from across visual art, music, design, and writing, where the act of translation between media is itself the work's subject.