PRINTERESTING » Digital Print

Green Space/Outer Space

A FRIEND OF PRINTERESTING — Mon, 17 May 2010 15:38:59 +0000

A guest post by Eric Zimmerman (of Cablegram). Green Space/Outer Space, an exhibition of digital prints by Leslie Mutchler, has been on view at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center Courtyard Gallery for the better part of 2010. Leslie Mutchler: Cabinets & Cosmos (below) is an essay Zimmerman wrote to accompany the exhibition.

“Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction? Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations of products, appliances, and gadgets by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species.”1

Modernist architecture and design followed the austere path of standardization. Reduction and simplicity promised to make our lives better through speed and efficiency, albeit with a large dosage of homogenization on the side. But Modernism’s quest for cleanliness of form and space seemed to forget one thing. Human nature and its tendency to follow all but the straight paths, and our desire to decorate, ornament, and fill our lives with an inordinate amount of stuff.

This stuff takes many forms: furniture, family photographs, books, records, knick-knacks, gadgets – you name it and people have it. It comes to us via catalogs, the Internet, thrift stores and hand-me downs and proceeds to fill our living spaces to the gills, transforming them into modern day cabinets of wonder. Few of us could live in the functionalist sobriety of a Modernist home. Could you part with your stuff? Call it an effect of capitalist consumerism or a deeper, psychological part of our nature, but we as a species like a lot of stuff in our lives.

Leslie Mutchler’s digital collages take images of our stuff – the standardized Ikea and Pottery Barn bookcases and cabinets, or the green swatches of color from their catalog pages – and builds things out of them. Choosing a single piece of furniture, a shelving unit for example, Mutchler scans and manipulates it within the computer to build complex architectural forms and landscapes. They are skeletons built from the accumulation of the duplicated object, their exteriors transparent, their structural bones cast from the very functional things one would normally find within them. In Outer Space/ Green Space (Space Station) a replicated bookshelf becomes the International Space Station, or the proposed space habitat the Stanford Torus, floating in a matte black sea, at once formal experiment and tongue in cheek comment on our accumulating natures and that of commodity culture. In Mutchler’s outer space images it is as though all storage units have finally been filled and we are faced with jettisoning our stuff into the cosmos. In our Utopian future we will be reunited with our things, which are left untainted by the vacuum of space.

In contrast, the green space images take earthly locations–Versailles, Chicago City Hall, and the California Academy of Sciences–and remove any trace of architectural presence. These structures become the negative spaces and swatches of green pulled from the pages of catalogs define the landscape, gardens, or in the case of Chicago City Hall, its green roof. Mutchler’s sparse images suggest that our current fascination with being “green” risks becoming another trend, a strategy for selling commodities, and simply a style; much to the detriment of the environment.

This notion of a reduction to mere style, of Modernist architecture or Ikea furniture, and environmental stewardship, bind these two groups of images together. Stylization saps things of their power and meaning, reducing ideas to surfaces and commodities that only need to endlessly replicated and plugged into the consumer system. Mutchler’s work navigates quietly in the seam between our psychological need for these objects and the sheer ridiculousness of peering over the precipice into a sea of mass-produced commodities and having to ask ourselves which one we like best. But her work is not a condemnation of this system, or of the objects contained within it. It is a simple and poetic act of reuse that allows us to see the pervasive nature of our stuff and for better or worse, our unwavering love of it.

1 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996): 1.

Cayetano Ferrer

Jason Urban — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:33:03 +0000

Cayetano Ferrer’s City of Chicago series integrates digital print/photo into the urban landscape resulting in less obtrusive signage…

(Thanks for letting me know about Cayetano’s work, Julie.)

Holiday Party Planning

Jason Urban — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:15:19 +0000

It’s early December and the holidays are nearly upon us. While we’re all getting sick of news stories about party crashers, it’s never too early to start thinking about your own holiday party guest list. You can borrow an printeresting idea from artist Joshua Callaghan and bring some celebrity cache to your yuletide get-together. Click on the picture for a link to Callaghan’s digital print project, Jay-Z Standing, Jay-Z Sitting.

While the hip hop superstar has a suspicious lack of legs, it doesn’t seem to be keeping people from enjoying his company. What would the holidays be without the interplay of reality and artifice?!

Sean P. Morrissey

Jason Urban — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:49:31 +0000

Sean P. Morrissey is a print artist to watch. Amazing screenprint/digital works and he does print-based installations, too.

Sean P. Morrissey, The Best Thing in the World, Silkscreen & Digital, 30″x22″, 2009.

Happy Holidays from Printeresting!

Jason Urban — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:08:19 +0000

“Baked” with love at Printeresting.org for your holiday pleasure… please enjoy our Printable Fruitcake! Click below to download a Printable Fruitcake PDF.

Crackpot or Jackpot

Jason Urban — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:58:51 +0000

News from the UK… In what has to be one of the more printeresting publicity stunts in recent times, Turner-prize winner Keith Tyson did a limited edition print giveaway two days ago.

Tyson allowed the first 5,000! Guardian readers who visited his website on December 9th to download a randomly generated image consisting of red, green and black vertical stripes- one download per IP address. Each visitor was expected to supply their own photo glossy paper.

The print images are based on one of his previous series, History Paintings. Tyson used a roulette wheel to generate the paintings but the prints are generated digitally. From The Guardian…

“The server will generate a sequence of the numbers one to 32 which relates to the roulette wheel,” he said. “Each number has an assigned colour. If you hit the jackpot, you’ll come away with an entirely green work. But the chances of that happening are 1 in 37 x 37 x 37, 49 times.”

Tyson’s piece brings up some interesting issues in regards to distribution and promotion. The Guardian article brings up a valid point when it mentions the degree to which the internet is underutilized as a vehicle for original artwork. Tyson himself acknowledges that this give-away, his first foray into printwork, is a fairly standard approach to interactivity…

His website – www.keithtyson.com – is, at the moment, primarily an information resource. But he hopes to exploit its possibilities more fully, by creating communities and open forums for discussions. “The print offer is one of the more conventional things I have planned,” he said. “I am always trying to bring the outside world into my work, rather than it’s being about the operation of an artist’s ‘unique eye’. This is just the first stage.”

So far he’s done a good job demonstrating the power a Turner Prize winner has to increase site traffic when coordinating a print giveaway with a major newspaper. People do love free stuff, after all. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here.

Old Printers, New Context

Jason Urban — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:56:36 +0000

Janet Zweig, a Brooklyn-based sculptor, has some great work on her website that gives computer printers a second life and new meaning. The majority of Zweig’s printer-based sculpture was executed in the nineties- though not that long ago it is interesting to note the “old-fashioned” quality of the printers. While they obviously have a more vintage feel now than when they were made, the idea of repurposing printers for something more than thier practical origins is still a valid one. With digital technology’s astounding rate of obsolescence, university surplus stores around the country full of equipment begging for new uses.

Janet Zweig, Thinking Contest, 1995.

About Thinking Contest from Zweig’s website…

Two computers were fed two different vocabularies of adjectives and nouns. In the gallery, each computer thinks up things using its vocabulary and writes sentences by saying “I am thinking of” followed by a randomly chosen adjective, followed by a randomly chosen noun. Some examples (from millions): “I am thinking of Etruscan careers.”, “I am thinking of theoretical mammals.”, “I am thinking of love-sick plywood.”, etc., etc. The big red needle gauges their brainpower.

Janet Zweig, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1993.

A key component in Zweig’s work appears to be the performative aspect of the printing. The conversation in the work isn’t about printers/printing but the action of printing is integral to the piece.

Leslie Mutchler at Big Medium

Jason Urban — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:46:22 +0000

Furniture Pallets, Digital Print on Coroplast, 24″x24″x3″, 2008.

Ever since Diana posted Process Oriented Furniture…, I’ve been meaning to mention the digital print work of Leslie Mutchler. Her work is currently on view at Big Medium in Austin, TX.

Mutchler has been working at the intersection of flatpack design and digital print for a few years now and this exhibition shows more results from her investigation. The sculptural Furniture Pallets are made from corrugated plastic and are covered with digital decals of furniture legs eluding to wood (and utilizing print). The pallets accompany a series of large-scale digital collages where Mutchler uses imagery appropriated from home furnishings catalogues to render landscape. The work stems from her interest in the marketing of organization as lifestyle. Read more here.

Untitled (Manufactured Utopia I: High density Housing), Digital Print, 80″x60″, 2008.

Discrete Space at Big Medium is a three-person exhibition curated by Joseph Phillips and also features the work of Sam Sanford and Jeannie McKetta.

Show & Tell: Candy by Derek Stroup

Jason Urban — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:12:42 +0000

Image Courtesy of the Artist’s Website

One of the biggest advantages of working with digital output has to be its flexibility. Once an image/idea is developed as a file, it can be adapted to different formats and media so easily. It’s an obvious observation but an image can be printed 2′x 2′ for one purpose and 2″x 2″ for another. If art is about making decisions, digital print output increases the amount of choices an artist gets to make (or at least changes the order in which some of those decisions have to made, right?).

A few months ago while browsing through the shelves at Printed Matter, someone pointed out a great book to me. A simple collection of images by Derek Stroup called Candy. Stroup’s book is a good example of this potential for reformatting. His website includes a body of work called Candy- individual inkjet prints of simplified candy wrappers. They’re quite beautiful- all text is removed and the viewer is left with “clean” packages. The images serve as a bellwether for our consumer conscience. Stroup has created a game of recognition reminding us of the branding we normally ignore. Each is listed as 16″x20″.

Stroup’s book at Printed Matter collects all of these candy images into a small accordion-bound mini-portfolio. But rather than exist as reproductions of another media (like a book of offset-printed images of paintings or etchings), there is no degree of separation. The book is just a different version of his larger digital prints.

20×200: Gallery as Publisher/Distributor

Jason Urban — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:42:41 +0000

Dustin Amery Hostetler, Color Study #4

In September of 2007, 20×200 ”opened its doors” as an on-line extension of Jen Bekman Gallery. Every week, they release two new archival print editions. Each image is available in three sizes: small (8 1/2″x11″) in an edition of 200 for $20 each, medium (17″x22″) in an edition of 20 for $200, and large (30″x40″) in an edition of 2 for $2000. All prints are digitally printed with archival ink on 100% cotton rag paper. Every print comes with a signed and numbered Certificate of Authenticity (interestingly, the actual prints are not signed). From their website…

As we see it, there are a lot of people out there who want to sell their art and a lot of people who’d like to buy it. They just have a hard time finding each other. The internet is the perfect place to bring those people together, and we’re exactly the right people to make it happen. We’re passionate about art and the internet at 20×200. We’re excited about creating a place where almost any art lover can be an art collector.

Similar print-focused projects seem to be popping up; another example is Threadless Prints. These ventures are finding a new way to reach potential collectors and are benefiting from the internet’s democratizing effect. The project has opened up the white box of the gallery to people otherwise excluded (whether by finances, geography, etc.). With luck and careful development, projects like these can be “gateway drugs,” planting a taste for print that becomes habitual.