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Curtis Bartone’s print media works address the uneasy and often unclear relationship between human beings and what we call the “natural” world. In these compositions, contrasting and disparate elements mix and mingle, molded into a single moment. The work examines the human need to not only classify and control--often out of fear and uncertainty--but to intervene and claim a place in the fabric of the landscape. Through the process of developing collages and sketches, and by further developing the composition on the print matrix, preconceptions about what “belongs” and what doesn’t are re-examined. Similarities and connections begin to emerge where none existed before. The division between native and invasive, wild and domestic, and even beautiful and ugly, becomes less clear, as does our role in this web of life. The printmaking process is an integral and necessary part of Bartone’s work. At times, the process acts as a collaborator, at times a foil, and at times a trickster. It often becomes necessary to make order from the unpredictable result of putting a plate in acid or even in running the matrix through a press. It is this dance with process that often reveals something deeper or more complex than the original idea. In Bartone’s latest work, printmaking becomes a metaphor for the landscape and the layers that are formed as it is cleared, farmed, paved, and industrialized. The ghosts and remnants of the past are always still present. Through the layering that is a signature of most print processes and the reworking of subsequent states, a history is constructed.