Artist Statement

I make images where figures emerge and recede through layered surfaces, exploring gender performance through stylization. Using printmaking, photography, and installation, my work ranges between abstraction and representation, tracing and giving form, registering visibility and persistence. Through both my studio art and curatorial publishing practices, I explore the ways images give meaning and create dialogue between maker and viewer.

Printmaking remains at the core of my art practice. I create intimate relief and screen prints drawing from my own photography, family archive, and sketchbook. I have made a lot landscape woodcut reduction prints. More recently I began a series of doll-like, abstracted figures that have evolved into hybrid portraits influenced by people I’ve met, film characters, and drag queens. I make traditional editions but also more experimental monoprints, including screen prints that include varying combinations of the layers of two different images. In these monoprints, the face is fully recognizable until it becomes obscured as more layers of blue camouflage are printed over it. Working at a larger scale has allowed me to capture more detail. I use color to add to the expressive quality of the prints, and try to let the colors build off and influence each other during the process. Reduction printmaking, where material is removed to build up layers, works along with making work about invisibility and visibility.

Photography for me is both part of my printmaking practice and an independent medium. My studio-photography includes my blue camouflage and cellophane photographs that examine the body, surface, and perception. In the blue camouflage works, I was exploring a subtle tracing effect inspired by seeing my shadow on the pool tile beneath me while swimming laps. The cellophane images convey vulnerability and the feeling of being trapped through wrapping and condensation that obscured my body.

My curatorial practice mirrors my studio practice; it’s slow, attentive, and built through sustained relationships. My work on the magazine involves attending art shows, conducting interviews, writing, and collaborating with artists to create and publish images and information about their work. Through this work, I continue my focus on process, material engagement, and the dialogue between artwork and viewers which complements my studio practice as well.

My installations build on these ideas, exploring viewer movement in relation to the work. Across print, photography, and installation, my practice explores layered figural imagery, the body and surface, inviting the viewer’s body in as part of the work.

Biography

Ray Seebeck is an artist & publisher currently living in the Detroit, Michigan area. They were born in Richmond, Virginia, but were raised in Chicago, Illinois where they later studied Print Media and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. After graduation, having their energy taking new forms, they were interested in following their impulse experimenting with different methods of drawing. As an early career artist, they focused mainly on making drawing series and book arts. In 2021 while living in New York, they started their independent art biennial Magazine TM that focuses on highlighting artists through creative handmade book arts techniques and is currently working on the third release. Later during a three year period while working at Free Range in Albany Park Chicago, they made over 50 woodcuts that focused on landscape, figures, and interiors, and two releases of their magazine. Their work can be found at a few collections including the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and the Samir Husni Magazine Collection at the University of Missouri. They are currently an MFA student in Print Media (2027) at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, engaging in different installation techniques and types of scale.