Diana Behl
Diana Behl
Diana Behl is an artist and educator based in Brookings, SD. She holds an MFA and MA in Printmaking from The University of Iowa, a BFA in Two-Dimensional and Design Studies from Bowling Green State University, and is an Associate Professor in the School of Design at South Dakota State University. Behl has received grants from the Bush and Griffith Foundations and the South Dakota Arts Council to support her artistic and teaching practices, which are rooted in traditional and expanded printmaking processes and works on paper.
Solo, two, and three-person exhibits have been at the Greenleaf Gallery at Whittier College (Whittier, CA), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE), Edward J. & Helen Jane Morrison Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Morris (Morris, MN), The Contemporary Dayton (Dayton, OH), and the South Dakota Art Museum (Brookings, SD). Recent group exhibits include Women's Work at Olson-Larsen Gallery (Des Moines, IA), Small Works at Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and The Contemporary Print at Flatbed Press (Austin, TX). Her works on paper have been featured in New American Paintings, "New Editions" in Art in Print, as well as in artist-run publications such as Maake Magazine and Printeresting's MANUAL.
The everyday is a central theme within my artistic practice. I engage in processes of inquiry using the language of print media, collage, and drawing to examine memory and my quotidian surroundings. Within these surroundings I observe and celebrate the ordinary: moments from my garden and home, passages read, fragments of places visited. I am interested in the work of poet Bernadette Mayer as a mode of interpretation and approach, and current projects use this as a framework through which narratives are shaped or distilled.
My work considers the space between direct and indirect means of image making. I investigate discords formed in and around the margins of this space: circuitous and lineal, reaction and calculation, clarity and uncertainty. Print media is inherently indirect. A printing matrix is a vessel of sorts, a holding ground for history, action, erasure, and the individual quality of your hand. I create images that are transferred onto surfaces—copper, linoleum, plexiglass—which are then carved, etched, marked, and inked. Those surfaces generate an impression, which is further developed and transformed through direct methods of layering, cutting, drawing, and distortion.
