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Posted by RL Tillman on March 11th, 2010 | 
“There’s Something Very Important I Forgot To Tell You” was a 2009 exhibit in Milan by Berlin-based artist Riccardo Previdi. The title of the show is a line from Ghostbusters; this piece is called Test. Printer calibration patterns culled from the Internet were printed on paper, which was crumpled and photographed. The photos were then reproduced on a plank of plywood.
Previdi’s work references print and pop culture in a cheeky exploration of mediated imagery, reproduction, and representation. The following images are taken from a 2008 show called C_YK – Black To The Future:
From the press release:
C_YK – Black To The Future connects an associative web around the culture- and design-history of print technology…Architectural interventions like the magenta coloured transparent foil on the gallery´s showcase changes the original perception of the gallery as a display for art. Looking through the foil, the magenta coloured surface merges with its surroundings as if the foil did not exist. The inner space of the gallery is divided by an additional yellow foil that changes the view of the wall beyond where “convolutions” of paper are installed. Only the mobility of the viewer allows the “real” consistence of the single elements that at the same time changes the view on the “Gestalt” of the others to be seen. The neon writing “C YK” is visible also from outside the gallery. The coloured and shiny letters C YK become a point of attraction, a cryptic code which simultaneously influences its surroundings…
All the single elements of the exhibition “C YK – Black To The Future” are autonomous objects, but seen as one whole, as an architectural intervention, they start to play with the idea of a constructivist stage of perception: C- M-Y- K.
Other projects of interest include Fraktur, an installation that references Gutenberg’s 1455 Bible, and The Last Desire, a series of public billboards.
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Posted by amze on March 8th, 2010 | 
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #33 is a full blown regional newspaper. McSweeney’s literary journal has always had a keen sense of design and often publishes some very lovely printed objects that straddle the line between art project and literary glee fest. Issue #33, alternately titled the San Francisco Panarama is great example of what a city newspaper could be. In their own words:
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterlyis a one-time only, Sunday-edition-sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It has news and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine, and is basically an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we could fit in there. It features journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.
But don’t take their word for it, read the San Francisco Chronicle article here, or continue reading this picture laden post. One of the most striking things about the paper is that it is an un-ironic project intended to inspire and model how to save newspapers.
Continue reading McSweeney’s Prints A Newspaper
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Posted by amze on March 8th, 2010 | 
Who Doesn’t love bound printed stuff? The Print Center sponsored Open Book as a way to model ideas addressed in their Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious exhibition. Needless to say most attendees walked away with a stack of books and Temporary Services (above) did their best to make sure no one walked away empty handed.
The Print Center describes the event:
This event will bring together the artist collectives Space 1026 and Temporary Services, who will be joined by the artists’ bookstore Printed Matter. Each will give presentations on their publications and how they relate to their artistic practice. It will be a wonderful opportunity to collect books, meet the artists and have them personally inscribe their books.
Continue reading Philagrafika 2010: Open Book
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Posted by amze on March 8th, 2010 | 
Katie Baldwin’s recent exhibition in the Print Center is a mighty fine example of contemporary moku hanga wood block printing. The show covers three bodies of work, Throwing our Things in the River, Things left behind, and another selection of prints of images of box designs that seem contain oblique narratives. Each collection are moku hanga wood block prints (multi-block & hand-printed) often with letter press text overprinted. The prints intimate in size and are printed in small editions. The text below in an excerpt from the artist’s statement, and it enumerates the magical thinking that provides an interior structure of these strange and magical images.
My images create a visual narrative, bearing witness to both the ordinary and extraordinary events of human life. I work in series; my prints complete each other as a non-linear account that attests to the complexity of the human condition. In this work, I am utilizing a perspective based on multiple points of view. I am interested in challenging the unity of time by the defiance of scale and by showing several moments at once. Daily life intersects with themes of work, relationships, culture, natural disasters and dumb luck.
Continue reading Katie Baldwin
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Posted by amze on March 1st, 2010 | 
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the Graphic Unconscious sites for Philagrafika 2010. The exhibition there, while modest in it’s square footage, comprises some of the most interesting conceptual work in the related exhibitions. The curatorial statement on the Philagrafika site describes the show, expertly curated by Shelley Langdale, below:
Concepts of imprinting, multiplicity, reproduction, and seriality, as well as printed images and print techniques are frequently used by artists who do not think of themselves as printmakers. As artistic vocabularies have expanded and mixing media has become commonplace, artists have increasingly drawn from inherent characteristics of the print to achieve specific aesthetic and expressive goals.
In keeping with its role as a major repository of the work of Marcel Duchamp, the “father” of Conceptual Art, the museum will feature exhibitions by two artists who translate aspects of printmaking into other mediums, pushing the conceptual boundaries typically associated with the print. Óscar Muñoz explores the ephemeral implications of the imprint with two projects: a new installation of portraits printed in pigment floating on water (shown in-process) and a suite of video portraits that involve a variation of this innovative printing technique. Using imagery inspired by Japanese cultural sources that range from traditional woodcuts to contemporary comics and animations, Tabaimo continues her examination of the complexities of everyday life with the U.S. debut of a 2007 video installation.
Continue reading Philagrafika 2010: Philadelphia Museum of Art
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Posted by amze on February 27th, 2010 | 
The New York-based Tova Carlin’s recent show at the 179 Canal project space, titled, A–>D–>A, meaning converting information from analog to digital and back again, no doubt a nod to the weird algorithms that generate these patterns. 179 Canal describes the project as:
Tova Carlin will occupy 179 Canal by wallpapering sections of the space and inviting artists to perform against/with this backdrop. This wallpaper, an arena for consideration of the securities that delineate daily experience, is photocopied from patterns on the interior of bank envelopes.
Security envelopes are a great example of the weird power given over to printed matter (exactly what kind of security do they give us?) and I can only imagine what kind of responsive performances this environment will generate. You can download your own set here.
   
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Posted by amze on February 20th, 2010 |
This post was written by Guest Contributor, Jena Osman.
On February 18th, another installment of Philagrafika 2010’s Out of Print series made its debut. This time the collaboration was between Enrique Chagoya and the Rosenbach Museum and Library. The Rosenbach Museum was founded by two book-dealing brothers in the 1950s and contains such treasures as the only surviving copy of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and the manuscript copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. They also hold about 4000 prints by George Cruikshank, the 19th century British caricaturist perhaps best known for illustrating the works of Charles Dickens. The Rosenbach’s website tells us,
In George Cruikshank’s time there were attempts (by bribe) to censor his work and even the royal family approached him in hopes of avoiding any further embarrassment from his brutal characterizations. Cruikshank was a populist artist whose socially critical images of drunkards and medical maladies were readily accessible through newspapers, magazines, books and broadsides.
Artist Enrique Chagoya was invited to the Rosenbach, and after sifting through the Cruikshank treasure trove, he chose to make a print after Cruikshank’s etching “The Headache.” (see Chagoya’s version above and Cruikshank’s original below)
(image from http://www.vandaprints.com/image.php?id=13610)
Chagoya’s version (which features President Obama suffering through the headache of trying to pass health care reform) is available as a takeaway at the exhibit, which also includes a small sampling of both Cruikshank’s and Chagoya’s works. Workshops are being held over the weekend where visitors can hand color Chagoya’s print.
Chagoya stated at his artist talk that the colors for his own edition are still being worked on. The print is being produced in collaboration with two Philadelphia print shops, C.R. Ettinger Studio and Silicon Gallery Fine Art Prints and includes both digital, chine collé and intaglio layers. During his slide presentation, Chagoya pointed to the many political satirists that have influenced his work: Goya, Jacques Caillot, Philip Guston, James Ensor, Victor Hugo, and the murals of Jose Clemente Orozco. You can see Chagoya’s version (featuring Ronald Reagan) of Goya’s “Contra el bien general” from The Disasters of War Series in the background.
This is a small exhibit, but definitely worth a visit. And while you’re at the Rosenbach, ask to see more of the Cruikshank prints or any of the other archival gems cached away there.
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Posted by RL Tillman on February 11th, 2010 | 
Ezra Claytan Daniels
Printervention is a part of Version 10: “Infrastructures and Territories” and will debut in Chicago this April. It’s a public print event inspired by Works Progress Administration projects; the work borrows heavily from the design of that era.
Printervention underscores the necessity for the support of artists and the idea of civic responsibility to the greater society. Inspired by the Depression era’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) that hired artists to make murals, posters and other art for the everyday, Printerventionists are asked to recreate that era’s style of communication. The project unfolds on the streets of Chicago, in storefront galleries and includes talks, workshops, public printing more. A mobile silk screen printing cart will be used to print and distribute works on the streets and in the parks of the City of Chicago.
If you weren’t interested at the beginning of that paragraph, I’m sure your curiosity was piqued by the phrase “mobile silk screen printing cart.” These images are from last year, when the project was test-driven as the “Bridgeport WPA Poster Project.”
Angee Lennard (Spudnik Press)
 Ryan Duggan
(Thanks to Gary the K for the tip!)
Posted by RL Tillman on February 9th, 2010 |  Art Shows! International Print Festivals! Conferences! We’re up to our eyeballs here at Printeresting World H.Q.
But we want to make sure you remember our amazing new PRINTERESTING NOTEBOOK! Check it out for more interesting printmaking miscellany!
Posted by amze on January 29th, 2010 | 
So it begins! This week marks the beginning of the wild rumpus that will be perhaps the largest print quadrennial is US history. The book above is the Philagrafika 2010 guide book, with a cover art by Carl Pope. Pope’s work seems a fitting epithet for what is going to be a huge cascading series of exhibitions and events, which is likely to kick-up a print frenzy the likes of which this town has not seen the British invaded in 1777.
If you don’t know what all the fuss is about head directly to the Philagrafika 2010 site and scroll through the blog and the line-up of artists and activities (which is literally too long to list here).
Continue reading Philagrafika 2010: So It Begins!
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