Eye Contact | Margaret Buchen

Buchen takes inspiration from moving images on film and video and is fascinated by the way such images convey visual information. Hoping to capture the myriad visual effects used in cinema, she takes still photographs of moving images and uses this source material to create a new kind of portraiture for our media-saturated age.

She is particularly interested in the charged emotions captured in extreme close-ups versus the indirect expression of emotion in our era of personal communication devices. Often her subjects—either two people or a single person with a self-reflection—seem to be conversing. Some works include text; in others, the subject(s) may be obscured by noise, glitches, or lines and shapes that mimic the way images are distorted by electronic transmission. In Buchen’s art, traditional film and digital technologies create a world that absorbs us all, but interpersonal communication is obscured by layers of media.

Artist Bio:
Margaret Buchen is a printmaker and art educator who has been working in Minneapolis since early 2024. Buchen is an active member of Highpoint Center for Printmaking and teaches art as an adjunct instructor at Concordia University. From 2006 – 2024 she taught printmaking and art foundations at Harper College, Palatine, Illinois, and acted as Art Curator of the Harper College Art Collection. She has shown her work in more than seventy group and solo exhibitions, including All for Print, Print for All, 2025, Harold Washington Library Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; Committed to Print, a National Invitational Printmakers Exhibition, 2024, Prospectus Art Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; and Prints 2021, National Juried Print Show, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, New York. Her work is included in many private and public collections.

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Image: Margaret Buchen, Eye Contact, screen print, 9 1⁄4” x 25”, 2025