On Tenterhooks

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courtesy Tandem Press

The "On Tenterhooks" exhibition at Tandem Press.

The "On Tenterhooks" exhibition at Tandem Press.

media release: Tandem Press announces a new exhibition now on view in the Tandem Press Apex Gallery. The show, titled On Tenterhooks, was guest curated by Devon Stackonis, our 2023-2024 University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student curatorial assistant. During her time working at Tandem over the past year, Stackonis familiarized herself with many of the prints that have been created at Tandem Press. As one of her final projects, she was challenged to conceptualize and curate an exhibition of prints, selecting pieces from the Tandem Press inventory and contextualizing them to create a unique statement.

This exhibition includes prints by Suzanne Caporael, Lesley Dill, Michelle Grabner, Manabu Ikeda, Nicola López, David Lynch, Judy Pfaff, Sam Richardson, Alison Saar, David Shapiro, and Steven Sorman. Art is on display through Aug. 16.

Curator Statement

Tenters and tenterhooks were commonly used as early as the fourteenth century as important elements in the process of weaving woolen fabric. Starting sometime in the eighteenth century, the phrase “on tenterhooks” came to mean “in suspense,” the way a piece of cloth is suspended from tenterhooks on a tenter. In contemporary literary use, it extends metaphorically to express a range of tension, anxiety, excitement, fear, and anticipation of what is yet to come.

On Tenterhooks asks the viewer to consider what is to come, to acknowledge the moment of anticipation between definitive events, to sit with the unknown and its many possibilities, and to find some grounding amidst the precariousness of it all.

I have selected a group of works from Tandem Press’s inventory that embody this notion of being suspended, stretched, or held in tension, either formally or metaphorically. These prints speak to extended moments of waiting nervously as events unfold. They represent various possible responses to a state of suspense, whether it is with great anticipation and excitement of a desired outcome, or with agitation, distress, and fear of its opposite. An acknowledgment of tension and discomfort in uncertainty can serve as a significant catalyst for change. In these moments between known and unknown, fear or stress may even shift to hope.

Curator Biography

Devon Stackonis is a visual artist and printmaker specializing in mezzotint and intaglio processes. Stackonis’ current body of work serves as a personal reflection of the mountainous coal regions of Eastern Pennsylvania where she grew up and the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of extractive industry.

Stackonis received her BFA from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and worked as Assistant in Printmaking at Bucknell University from 2018-2020. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024. She was recently awarded a Fulbright Fellowship through which she will spend ten months in Wrocław, Poland beginning in September 2024, creating mezzotints and studying the Upper Silesian Coal Basin.

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