Those seeking visual pleasure that arises from intellectual interest will not be disappointed by a trip to the Kala Institute for its current offering: Residency Projects IV--an exhibition featuring work by 2007 Kala Fellows Adriane Colburn, Taraneh Hemami, and Leslie Shows. The fellowship provides six months of access to its extensive digital and traditional printmaking facilities along with a cash prize and an exhibition of the work produced during the residency. While that may sound like parameters for rather arbitrary groupings this exhibition is surprisingly coherent. And the bond goes beyond aesthetics. Despite the three's distinct practices and approaches to printmaking the works in the show exert fields of mutual attraction like moons tugging at the planet to which they are tethered. The lush, colorful prints on display here are really just the tips of icebergs--surfaces that betray deeper investigations into subjects both personal and political. It's these underlying forces, only partially visible, that have shaped the work and mingle with each other in the room. Together they form a generative dialectic between the nature of geology and geography or vertical and horizontal thinking--revealing huge gaps between gathering, organizing, and synthesizing knowledge.

FOR THE DEEP-Phase One, archival inkjet print, 2008.

Adriane Colburn's FOR THE DEEP-Phase One continues her exploration of abstraction as engendered by maps and cartography. The piece, a paper construction consisting of an irregular 3D scaffolding supporting what looks like a fractured rainbow, was derived from topographic data collected aboard The Healy, a US Coast Guard icebreaker commissioned by the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping to make maps of the Arctic Ocean floor (our modern day terra incognita). Colburn spent a month aboard The Healy working with the scientist, observing, and recording natural phenomena in the Arctic this summer and predicts she will be making work informed by the experience for the next few years. Colburn describes Phase One as "preliminary studies for...a large-scale project that will address the relationship between Artic mapping, climate change, and the Law of the Sea Treaty." (The US and other bordering countries stand to substantially expand their national boundaries based on the research being conducted.) As a visualization of knowledge and information, and its relationship to formal abstraction Colburn's work is compelling. It will be interesting to see how, or if, she incorporates the political aspects of her research into the project.

Theory of Survival, pigment prints on aluminum, 2008.

More overtly political is Taraneh Hemami's Theory of Survival, a multi-faceted and evolving project that has involved curation, archiving, and community organization and dialogue to explore issues around Iranian-American political and cultural identity. At the center of the project is a historical collection of protest literature--books, pamphlets, newspapers, posters and various documents--formerly held by the Iranian Students Association of Northern California (active from 1964-1982). Now housed at the Library of Congress the archive charts political discourse amongst a segment of the Iranian diaspora during the Shah's regime and, after 1979, the Islamic Republic, but it also intersects with Bay Area history during this period.

Theory of Survival (detail).

All this I gathered from supplemental text about the project. I confess, I am rather naïve about Iranian history and I cannot read Arabic. So the work on display in the Kala galleries, seven 24 by 72 inch panels featuring digital prints of selections from the archive, did little to illuminate any specific content. The absence of the original objects only underscores their inaccessibility to me. While the reproductions convey a sense of urgency and rebellion in their austerity and lo-fi utility I could really only relate to them in nostalgic terms (the DIY aesthetic in the era before desktop computers appeals to me). Looking at Hemami's past endeavors it's easy to see how a far more engaging project could have grown out of this highly evocative source material.

Salt Mine (detail), photo-etching and salt, 2008.

The visually inventive work of Leslie Shows is the only in the exhibition to incorporate traditional printmaking techniques, along with digital output, collage and painting. It's a testament to her experimental and idiosyncratic approach to image making that only one of the nine "prints" on view is the result of a single process. The application of salt to two photo-etchings of a salt mine are notable examples. These prints sparkle from the crystals that have formed on their surfaces, successfully joining an objective materiality with an illusionistic depiction of space. This mixing of literal and figurative--real and symbolic--is typical of Shows' work and somehow inseparable from her preoccupation with the fact that human bodies and their environments are made of the same stuff as the earth and therefore subsumed by geologic processes. Compared to her large scale, intricate, image-laden imaginary landscapes the work in the Kala show is stripped down, but her psychedelic vision of entropy is intact. The series of four thunderheads, each representing one of the four humours, are emblematic.

Rachel (blood), archival inkjet print and collage, 2008.

The basis for an antiquated theory of medicine and psychological typology tracing back to the early Greek philosophers and later adopted by European practitioners, the four humours originate as substances produced by organs in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Whether these substances are in balance or not effects one's physical and mental health. More subtly they correlate to temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. Shows' thunderheads imagine the bodily fluids and their accompanying moods as external meteorological forces concentrated into ominous but transitory forms brooding over the landscape. At first glance they appear as layers of gestural brushwork. The horizon and sky come second, and then the discovery that these images are carefully constructed from numerous elements--the "painting" too has been cut apart, reconfigured, digitally manipulated--creating a sort of hesitant unity in the images, as if they are as likely to dissipate as real storms.

Residency Projects IV will be on view at the Kala Institute through November 22nd.