Etching with aquatint, photo-lithography and screenprintexpand_more
Gift of funds from the Print and Drawing Councilexpand_more P.97.9
The "34th City" in the title of this print refers to St. Louis, Missouri, which in population was America's 34th largest city when this print was made. Known for combining figurative and abstract imagery, Michael Byron used a photograph he made of a train overpass in St. Louis as a foundational motif. Over this modern, but ordinary image, he printed etched figures drawn with a deliberate clumsiness. Appropriated from a nineteenth-century tattoo chart, the small figure riding a camel recalls another time and place and provokes an awareness of pictorial dimension. Byron is fascinated with these ideas of contrasting landscapes, time frames, and states of mind. In this weightless and timeless realm, metaphor reigns supreme, evoking meaning from contrast and association.
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