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Having established herself as an accomplished printmaker and artist during the 1990s, Teresa James took a hiatus from the gallery scene after 2005 to focus on her atelier, White Wings Press. A specialist in intaglio printmaking, she has spent the past few years perfecting the integration of drawing, photography, computer-generated imagery, and 19th-century photographic processes. Not All Angels Have Wings represents the culmination of her experiments, merging these disparate elements to create large-scale cyanotypes that invite the viewer into a parallel realm of the unseen.
James' works have long explored spiritual or religious themes, taking their inspiration from such various sources as Catholic iconography, the Italian Renaissance, Mexican Surrealism, and American folk art. In this latest series, she lifts the veil that obscures our double existence in the temporal and metaphysical worlds. Everyday people and animals—many of them James's friends and their pets—are revealed as agents in the eternal battle of good and evil, their heroic spirits armored or winged. Behind these works lie other invisible struggles: the artist's painstaking labor to balance the generative forces of nature, man, and machine, and the soul's resolve to manifest optimism and grace in the face of life's trials. At their core, these are portraits of faith, bathed in a celestial blue.
Teresa James has been an artist and printmaker in Chicago for the past 20 years. In 1991, while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, she was approached by artist Tony Fitzpatrick to assist with his studio, Big Cat Press, and soon became the workshop's master printer. In 2002, she left Big Cat to establish her own print atelier, White Wings Press. Her prints and drawings have been exhibited widely throughout North America and internationally, and her works are in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art, Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.
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