Wrecking Yard I

Dennis's interest in working industrial subjects on the Pacific Northwest waterfront finds direct expression here. A wrecking yard — a salvage operation for cars, machinery, or marine equipment — gives a printmaker a dense, layered subject of stacked, broken forms suited to relief carving. The woodcut technique allows Dennis to articulate rust, broken glass, and tangled metal as a field of cut marks set against larger planes. The Roman-numeral I in the title indicates a paired or serial work, a strategy Dennis used repeatedly. Wrecking yards belong to a longer tradition in American printmaking — the industrial subjects of Reginald Marsh, Martin Lewis, and the WPA generation — but Dennis treats them with more pictorial flatness, in keeping with his interest in Japanese print structure where overlapping silhouettes describe space without deep recession. The 1993 date places the print in a productive year of industrial subjects.