Thinking itself is thought as differencing and repeating.

Charles E. Scott 1

The prints by Catherine Chauvin and the drawings by Justin Quinn in this exhibition entail modes, levels, of iteration: synchronically within each work, and diachronically within the sequence of works. Within Catherine Chauvin's lithographs, elements are repeated with the several prints. The traditional notion of printmaking as entailing multiples involves the repetition of the print within an edition; it can as easily entail repetition of elements of a print across editions and across works in a variable edition. In Justin Quinn's drawings, the repetition of a single element serves as a basis for the work. To regard the works in this way is to attend not only to the marks in themselves which comprise the works, but to the marks in relationship to each other, both in the individual work and in the multiplicity of works.

The repeated mark-Quinn's E, Chauvin's treatment of surfaces and motifs in her several prints-instantiates difference, différence, differing and deferring, spacing and temporization. 2 Echolalia is in the indefinite repetition of the same word, regarded by Piaget as playful. 3 In Catherine Chauvin's prints, various motifs are repeated, differently stated, from one print to another. These repetitions are not simply reuses of a motif, but expansions of the motif through difference: a tree motif is repeated, but with overprinting, without overprint, with variations in sharpness and contrast, realizing differences in spatial function concomitant with differences in signification of the motif. In Justin Quinn's drawings, the capital letter E, commonly the largest letter on eye test charts using the Latin alphabet, is playfully repeated. The obvious distinctive aspect of this play is the scale at which the letter E is used. In these drawings, the letter E is about the scale of eight-point type and thus very small proportionately to the sheet, unlike its use as proportionately large with respect to the sheet in Quinn's color woodcut Nihil Est II, 2000. Thus its use in these drawings positions them as an eye test at the level of the gestalt as well as at the level of signifier. The mark qua sign is at once signifier and signified, expression and content, form and substance, indexical trace and physical residue. In these drawings, the capital letter E functions as a module, repeated with variations of pressure and thus of density of the deposited graphite. This variation in the weight of the mark modulates the surface, clustering into areas of relative lighter and relatively darker passages. Placed one after another, the marks iterate a line, typically a line that wanders up and down from a hypothetical straight line. Placed one after another, the lines iterate a grid, but a grid stretched, warped, undulating, and rent by variation in spacing between lines. Small in relation to the sheet, the visual texture of the grid of Es suggests that of fragments of window screen printed in relief. Throughout the drawings, Quinn works within a dialogue between the space opened by the modulation of the marks and the proportion between the constellated units built up of the individual modules, and the whole of the field of the paper support in its materiality. The space between the marked passages, and between the marked passages and the edges of the sheet, are crucial, enabling tension and balance as metaphors across the space, while the variations in shape, value, and density of the marked passage extend this metaphor into the virtual depth of the space. The physicality of the material, its imperfections of wrinkles and texture, the slicing into the bottom edge at the right of 4650 Times E, asserted by installing the sheets with hinges, enters into the relations of balance and tension: because of their difference from a uniformly perfect sheet, these loci are more attended to than more uniform, less different passages. As such, these, scarcely less than the marked passages, are shapes entering into relation with the whole of the composition.

Repetition entails the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of return. 4 Return in repetition is implicated in language-one must attend to the modular mark of Quinn's works as a letter in an alphabet, as the letter E or more precisely tokens of the type5 of the letter E-for as Roman Jakobson has urged, the sensefulness of semantic entities is in itself signified by reiterability as a fundamentum divisionis distinguishing random from meaningful sounds. 6 Quinn's use of the majuscule E denies its status as a letter in an alphabet, denies its function as a linguistic signifier, for the linguistic signification is undermined precisely through the reiteration on which linguistic signification depends, even as its status as a letter in an alphabet is asserted simplicitur.

Repetitions, of the letter E, of the several recurrent elements of Chauvin's prints, are to each other as the various copies of a given edition of a newspaper: thus Wittgenstein's joke that one attends to the several instances "as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to reassure himself that what it said was true." 7

Catherine Chauvin is Lecturer in Printmaking, School of Visual Arts, and Master Printer, Print Research Institute for North Texas, University of North Texas. Chauvin completed the Printer Training Program with Master Printer Certification from Tamarind Institute of Lithography; she received the Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from Syracuse University, and the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Recent exhibitions include: Sugar and Spice, University of Maine, Presque Isle; Drawing: On Beuys, University of Dallas; Sixty Square Inches, Purdue University; New Prints From Texas, Women and Their Work, Austin. Chauvin is co-author, with Paul Croft, of Stone Lithography (London: A&C Black, 2001).

Justin Quinn is Assistant Professor and Printmaking Coordinator at the School of Visual Arts, University of North Texas. Quinn received the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.

1. Charles E. Scott, The Language of Difference (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987), 99.
2. Jacques Derrida, "Différence," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3-27
3. Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain (Cleveland: Meridian, 1955); see also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 53.
4. Rosalind E. Krauss, "U uncanny," in Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 194.
5. For the distinction of token and type, see C. S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), vol. IV, 423: the type is the universal of which tokens are instances.
6. Roman Jakobson, "Why Mama and Papa?" Selected Writings, vol. 1 (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 538-545.
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1.265; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 94e.