Nick and Nadine of Sonnenzimmer talk about their collaborative approach to making the poster for the 2010 Printers’ Ball.
If only every print could have a “making of” video!
   
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For whatever reason, a lot of the artwork I saw in China seemed to avoid any direct provocation and traded in an accomplished, though slightly mechanical adherence to representational painting. I think that’s why I like these screenprints by Chinese wunderkind Ying Yefu at Art Labor in Shanghai. Yefu’s work speaks of his culture while maintaining a contemporary (and for better or worse a slightly Western?) aesthetic. While Yefu may not push political buttons in an overt way, he does feel comfortable veering from the expected.
Art Labor’s Canadian founder/director, Martin Kemble, appears to be making a conscious effort to foster and support the work of “non-traditional” artists like Yefu. From the Art Labor’s facebook page, “ART LABOR Gallery, a friendly gallery in Shanghai that is trying to change an art scene into something a bit bigger and better than the presently insular self-obsessed Chinese Contemporary Art Scene… we represent artists, we don’t really give two toots where you come from.” Kemble, who was at the gallery when I stopped by, was generous with advice for those new to Shanghai. If you’re heading to Shanghai, Art Labor should be on your list of places to visit.
Continue reading Dispatches from China: Ying Yefu at Art Labor
It’s March in Austin and SXSW excitement is palpable. Some people come for the music, some for the films, some for the interactive media but what I’m most excited about (print nerd that I am) is Flatstock 24. Started by the American Poster Institute, Flatstock is traveling poster show that hits Austin every year for SXSW. It’s a huge exhibition where everything is for sale. With an average price of $20 for a hand-printed poster, almost everyone leaves with something. Established poster veterans and young upstarts are on the scene showing work and mixing it up with each other and fans alike. All and all a great sense of community permeates the giant, table-filled hall. Here’s a full list of the more than 100 exhibiting artists who’ll be in Austin Thursday through Saturday of next week(3/19-3/20). The big event at this year’s Flatstock 24 will be the a Smokey Robinson/Shepard Fairey poster signing in conjunction with the release of Fairey’s new Robinson poster. Also, Serie Project, Inc is teaming up with Andy MacDougall of Squeegeeville to do live screenprinting demos for the public. As I understand it, one of the posters they’ll be printing is Sean Simmons’ winning design from The Great Texas Rock Poster Contest (see the picture above). Sean is a student at the Art Institute of Austin. Nice work, Sean! A great Flatstock tradition is that many of the artists who show their work make posters to commemorate Flatstock itself. Here are pics pulled straight from the gigposters.com Flatstock 24 forum.
Michael Loderstedt is a Cleveland-based artist whose print work covers a broad range of subject and process. Schiff Geschicte, a recent sculptural printwork, is a screenprint dealing with the American artist’s ancestral connection to Germany. The form represents the ship that carried Loderstedt’s pregnant mother to the United States. The piece starts out as a flat, double-sided screenprint that is then cut and assembled to render a three-dimensional finished product. The exterior of the ship is adorned in German national colors overlayed with German text and the interior of the ship is overlayed with English text.
More pictures of the ship as well as Loderstedt’s own words on the piece after the jump.
“Site-specific” is not a term commonly used to describe screenprints but in this case, it’s a valid descriptor. Eva Wylie makes beautiful accumulations, often silkscreened directly to the wall. She culls and edits images from the internet and other ephemeral sources to create elaborate webs of fantastical scenery. These two-dimensional landscapes scroll along the surface of the wall like carefully-placed shelves covered in bits and fragments of trivial ornamentation. By removing a traditional printing substrate from the equation, Wylie activates the white wall as space for collaged meandering. In stark contrast to most mural works which are designed to be read from a distance, Eva’s image strategy maintains a scale more typical of paper requiring close inspection to appreciate the layering and juxtaposition of elements. More pictures of Eva’s work after the jump. And if you’re going to SGC in Phila, you can see her work in the Medium Resistance exhibition at Crane Arts.
Austin, TX is known for music so it’s not surprising that hand-screenprinted music posters are a big part of the local color. Wayne Alan Brenner wrote an informative article called The Art Is Formally Known as Prints for the Austin Chronicle back in early November about the scene. If you can forgive the title, it’s definitely worth a read. Brenner does a good job of documenting the lineage of recent Austin screenprinting. It’s a pretty tangled web but he manages to cut through it and tell a story of a vibrant community. In the article, Sam Coronado and his Serie Project get their due respect as a real force in the Austin print community so I decided I was long overdue for a visit. Located in East Austin, The Serie Project, Inc. is “a non-profit Latino organization that produces, promotes and exhibits serigraph prints created by established and emerging artists.” Master Printer Sam Coronado started the Serie Project in 1993 after a visit to Self Help Graphics in Los Angeles. To date, Serie has trained countless printers and worked with over 150 artists. Assistant Director James Beard had some time to show me the shop and some prints.
Elshopo celebrates the King of Pop with 200 silkscreened pancakes (or maybe crêpes).
Who is Elshopo? According to thier website… Elshopo is an artistic collaborative platform founded in 2001 in Grenoble (FR) by three young artists. It’s a meeting place for art, design and economy wich is stongly oriented towards an artisanal and experimental practice of the silk-screen medium. Elshopo re-visits the universe of graphic industry and encourages the production of multiple art in order to set up a philosophy based on artistic exchanges and dynamic transmission of the knowledges. It’s the position that Elshopo has kept since the begining and will keep in the future too, even in the cyberspace. See more of Elshopo’s edible printworks. (via Karisa at WPG) This post authored by Leslie Mutchler. Recently I was asked to be a Visiting Artist at Kent State University’s Summer Blossom Program in Printmaking. While there I was able to do a number of studio visits with printmakers working in a variety of media. One artist in particular stood out to me- a current graduate student in the Printmaking Department at KSU, Emily Sullivan.
Sullivan’s work exists somewhere between the real and the simulated; occupying spaces both large and small. Sullivan’s prints are not only bright, intense color studies- serigraphs of tidy lines, grid patterns, and geometric shapes- but are further processed- paper is cut and reassembled, scored and folded, manipulated into objects, landscapes and environments and then photographed and digitally printed. DIY-ers! Behold the well-named, kookily disorganized Screenulacra:
Be sure to check out the interactive “How To Make” section (although it seems to be a work-in-progress).
“Screenulacra!” Names just don’t get any better than that. Sean P. Morrissey is a print artist to watch. Amazing screenprint/digital works and he does print-based installations, too.
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