experiments
my work has had something of an experimental bent this year. i’d like to ease into a more cogent (if possible) body of work, though one that’s still interdisciplinary, for next year, but that meant getting a lot of stuff out of my system this year. last semester, i made a piece that dealt with my feelings of inadequacy as a printer. forgive the bad cell phone photos.
it’s a 3D work i made using screenprint, including water-soluble crayon monoprinting, reproducing an actual-size litho stone and roller. i wanted to use a naive aesthetic, because the medium makes me feel like a child.. crayons seemed appropriate. i’ve done lithography before and since, but failing to fully understand the science behind it makes it a little mystifying and alienating. it’s made out of paper and whatever support materials i could get to work (a styrofoam dowel, plastic container lids). here’s a detail of the text:
it should be noted that the antagonist of the text is not a real person. lithographers are some of the nicest people i’ve ever met.
full text:
HEY, DUMMY. WHAT’S THE MATTER? TOO STUPID TO TELL ACETIC FROM NITRIC? ARE YOUR PUNY ARMS TOO WEAK TO GRAIN, WUSSY? WHAT A WIMP. YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE. THEY ALL KNOW THAT IT’S TRUE: YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR LITHO.
another experimental work i did this year was a site-specific piece for OCAD’s yellow stairwell. the only real guideline was that it needed to be a print medium. i took it as an opportunity to try something out. the piece was, ultimately, a failure, but the process was interesting.
the image is a borrowed jack kirby panel from one of the first issues of fantastic four. first i laid down a rectangular substrate of gesso, hoping to work on a less saturated area than the yellow of the walls. i applied what was supposed to be an aged newsprint colour (it turned out a little pink) of acrylic screen ink. the colour areas (the C, M, Y, and K) were prepared as hand-cut vellum stencils. i attempted to mimic the look of offset printing by pushing my ink through a coarse wire frame with a sponge. the colours were applied using period-correct screen angles, by rotating the screen mesh with a protractor.
the end result was too saturated, and too uneven. my ink was too opaque for the amount of colour that made it through the screen. it did, however, produce interesting shapes and patterns, as seen in this detail. there was a chunk missing out of the wall, which created an unsightly and undesired big black blob. while it was an unwelcome addition to the piece, using an uneven surface, one that resists uniform applications of ink, or has hidden recesses and texture, is a tool i’d like to consciously revisit later.
