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Founder and former director of Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and Silver Spring resident, artist Helen Frederick has devoted much of her career to experimenting with a variety of printmaking techniques and combining them to create an exceptionally broad range of works on paper. An intelligent and provocative exhibit of her recent work is at the District's Washington Printmakers Gallery.

The show's title, "Indefinite States of Emergency," makes a number of subtle references. The first is to printmaking itself in that prints are usually the result of an indefinite number of interim "states" that the artist tests along the way. Yet, the word also might allude to America's states, and the emergencies all around us. This type of verbal juxtaposition that yields many potential ideas is the perfect analogy to what Frederick does with images in these works. Her "visual convergences" are based on a group of "print matrices" or repeating images she employs as a kind of limited vocabulary to be pictured and layered in ways that will produce multiple meanings.

Frederick has described herself as "an engineer of layered meanings rather than a maker of prints." In fact, she is both: delving into the visual culture of our times, celebrating the contingent and the provisional, and coming up with works on paper that are rich with meaning and visually compelling.

The discipline of using image matrices creates a sense of unity among the works that is both formal and iconographic. The repeating images, seen in different combinations and colors, are like what the Mexican critic Octavio Paz called "Signs in Rotation." Their shifting significance in context permits a transparency that frees the viewer from fixed interpretation. This latter is among Frederick's stated aims: "…we need first to free ourselves from the normal way we interpret facts," suggesting an intellectual freedom that can allow change on a personal as well as a social level.

Frederick uses both very personal images (MRI's of her pelvis and birth canal, a digital portrait of herself bending forward); societal images of emergency and fear (mushroom clouds, acid rain, the words HUNGER and NO DEFENSE) and polyvalent images that oscillate between positive and negative connotations (TV and computer monitors, racing particle systems, thumbprints).

The act of bending forward or bowing is seen in Frederick's digital self-portrait "Mudra and Particle Systems" and in the repeated outline drawing of the little girl, tripled to indicate movement, and stretching out six small hands toward or touching the earth. Each time she appears, the setting is different, revealing something new under the surface.

In "Fear," among the larger works, the implications seem definitively negative. Here the artist employs various techniques including solarplate, monoprint and a collage of found papers featuring two small cards. One claims that the U.S. supplies billions of dollars worth of arms to fuel world conflicts, while the other refers to the huge stockpile of nuclear warheads that still exists here.

The folded collage mimics the form of the nuclear symbol. Above it a thick textured paper is printed with a mushroom cloud form in bright orange gestural strokes over the MRI's of the artist's pelvis. Beneath this, against streaming waves of color, the tripled girl reaches toward an orange semi-circle bearing the printed word "fear." In another context, the little girl could be seen as innocently playing, but here she seems blind. Her gestures appear to be desperate attempts to find something, or to cover something up, perhaps the information printed on the cards. The idea of birth connoted by the MRI's is opposed by the allusion to nuclear annihilation.

Like most of the works here, "Fear" is an edition of one. Despite the print techniques used to create it, it is unique, thus blurring its media genre. This is also true of the six framed panels that occupy one wall of the gallery; each contains three prints comprising one work. Here it's not only what is within each field, but how the images relate to each other within the panel. Words like "caution" and "hunger," but also positive peaceful images, like a smiling Buddha and candles burning in the dark, send messages about the fragmented state we're in. One of the panels, "Looking for his Wife," a mix of solarplate, screen and digital prints, captures and objectifies poignant TV images of a man searching for his loved one in the floods after the China earthquake. The allusion to the flickering and constantly changing imagery of television has long intrigued many artists, beginning with the late Robert Rauschenberg, to whom these works owe some acknowledgment. As the great innovator of the postmodern idea, of "letting the world in" as he said, Rauschenberg created the template for the multi-imaged work, shifting the subject of painting from nature to visual culture in all its aspects. He, too, employed a series of repeating signs. These were juxtaposed to a variety of things in his works, called "facts" by critics because they came straight from the environment.

Neither artist suffers in the comparison. Frederick has not only understood the significance of Rauschenberg's precedent, but has also absorbed and transformed it into something completely personal and totally of this moment.