Leaving New York

'Leaving New York' is a 2007 mokuhanga work that anchors an abstract composition in biographical and urban context. Vollmer is based in New York, where she has long taught at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and other institutions, and the title suggests a moment of departure — geographic, psychological, or temporal. Urban scene classification indicates the work engages with the city as a subject, even if abstractly, and mokuhanga's capacity for layered atmospheric washes could render the visual density of an urban environment — the grid, the recession of streets, the weight of built space — through accumulated color fields on dampened washi. Departure as a theme in printmaking has particular resonance: the artist leaves a mark on a block, that mark leaves an impression on paper, and the original act of carving recedes into repetition and distance. The work may carry a quality of inventory or farewell, form organizing itself against the experience of imminent absence.