ongoing indifference explosion spitzack woodblock woodcut mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art

Ongoing Indifference Explosion uses the controlled, ritualized mokuhanga process to render an image of uncontrolled rupture — a tension that gives the piece its conceptual weight. The title pairs the durative "ongoing" with the instantaneous "explosion," suggesting a composition that holds a moment of detonation in suspended duration, perhaps through radial geometry or fragmented forms across the washi. Water-based pigments and the baren-applied impression yield soft edges and tonal bleeds, qualities that work against the hard-edged graphic vocabulary explosions usually receive in Western printmaking, and which Spitzack appears to exploit for expressive contradiction. The work belongs to a thematic cluster within his 2024 output — alongside The Trigger and In Danger of Collapse — that uses imagery of instability and crisis as subject matter. This sustained engagement with charged contemporary content distinguishes Spitzack's practice from American mokuhanga work oriented toward landscape or decorative tradition, and contributed to the recognition his work received at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen.