The San Francisco Zen Center Art Lounge Presents: TYPES OF KARMIC FORMATION – running from September 2-30, 2011

An opening reception for this new art exhibition by Bay Area artist Laurie Justine Szujewska will be held on September 2 at 6pm.

To be followed by a reading by poet and Zen priest Norman Fischer, from his new book conflict, from 7:30-9 pm.

For Bay Area artist and typographer Laurie Justine Szujewska, the word is the image. She creates one-of-a-kind prints using the mediums of vintage wood type, oil paints and inks on a Vandercook letterpress. Szujewska (shoe yév skä) employs this antiquated technology not for its nostalgic value, but to bring letterforms forth from their familiar contexts around us into surprising, playful, and sometimes jarring relief. Approaching the letterpress as a singular, mark-making tool instead of its customary function as a reproducing machine, Szujewska works with type the way a painter works with a brush, inviting the imperfections and past associations of worn and obsolete wooden letterforms to offer fresh new insights on the largely ubiquitous and invisible role type plays in our everyday surround.

WHEN: Friday, September 2, 1011, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m.

VENUE: San Francisco Zen Center Art Lounge, 300 Page Street, at Laguna Street, San Francisco

INFO: Admission is free. Visit www.ensatinapress.com/news for more information.

About Laurie Justine Szujewska:

Ms. Szujewska’s artwork has been exhibited in galleries in Chicago, New York City, Portland, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been a guest artist at the San Francisco Art Institute, and has taught design and typography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She has also been a guest lecturer at many universities. Ms. Szujewska (shoe yév skä) received her masters degree from the Yale School of Art. She later served as an art director for the type division of Adobe Systems, where she was responsible for the design of numerous award-winning projects, including the popular typeface Giddyup.

Ms. Szujewska has focused almost exclusively on the letterpress as an artistic medium since establishing Ensatina Press in 2005. A love of words, type, and all things typographic has always been central to her work. Writing in The Education of a Typographer (2004), edited by Steven Heller, Ms. Szujewska noted that: “Working with the press…provides me with a visceral experience of letterforms as shapes and sculpture moving in space.”

Ms. Szujewska’s home and studio is located on Sonoma Mountain in Sonoma County.

About the San Francisco Zen Center:

Established in 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971), San Francisco Zen Center is today one of the largest Buddhist sanghas outside Asia. It has three practice places: City Center, in the vibrant heart of San Francisco; Green Gulch Farm, whose organic fields meet the ocean in Marin County; and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center—the first Zen training monastery in the West—in the Ventana Wilderness inland from Big Sur. These three complementary practice centers offer daily meditation, regular monastic retreats and practice periods, classes, lectures, art exhibits, and workshops.