Read Highpoint Editions artist Carolyn Swiszcz's review of Alarm Alarm, a series of progressive etchings by HP artist cooperative member Jeremy Lundquist, currently on view in HP's Threshold Gallery:

I highly recommend "Alarm Alarm," Jeremy Lundquist’s show of progressive etchings in the Threshold Gallery at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis. A progressive etching is a print process in which an image is created on a copper plate and printed, and then the same plate is scraped and re-worked with new imagery and printed again (eight times in this project). You can often see remnants of older states in subsequent images. This way of working produces rich detail, and in this case there are also dense layers of meaning accompanying the imagery.

The bland security companies depicted here call to mind similar enterprises in the forlorn industrial sections of town right before the freeway on-ramp. You could pass by for years and be hard-pressed to recall exactly what business most recently occupied that concrete box. The awning, the shrubs, the tiles, the flag: the everyday stuff we tune out is represented here, dreamlike, dissolving into geometric shapes and blending with previous layers. The ghosts recall how these shells change hands and get re-used, usually for another equally unmemorable enterprise. If you know my work you can see why this facet of the series pulled me in.

And then there’s the deeper reading. The repetition of Alarm might have you saying the word in your head. Alarm as a noun, like what you set the night before something important; alarm as a state of mind, like how you might still be feeling even though “the pandemic is over;” alarm as a system you may buy to help you feel secure. There are so many alarms going off right now: klaxon noises and car alarms and thin little electronic beeps sounding emergencies for climate, democracy, race, economic inequality. Individually and collectively we’ve adjusted to the noise and we’ve tuned them out. Some we’ve disabled permanently like an annoying smoke detector.

I encourage you to take a look and see what meaning you can find in this work. The show closes at the end of June. You can also see the excellent show Prints from Crow’s Shadow in the main gallery at Highpoint.

Alarm Alarm is on view at Highpoint Center for Printmaking through June 30, 2021.