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Lousy-looking ads for the lousy-looking movie Bruno:
photo by Flickr user jetsetcd
It’s one thing when street ads actually pretend to be street art. You may feel like a sucker when the latest viral meme turns out to be a soda pop commercial, but at least the ad agency gets credit for a “gotcha.”
On the other hand, these Bruno posters don’t even try to fool you. They just ape an aesthetic, badly. The movie is meant to be an edgy satire, but this ad campaign is less subversive than the ads for a Disney movie about a talking chihuahua.
Ah, well. We snooze, they lose!
Last Friday the traditionally traditional Washington Printmakers Gallery hosted a reception for its current show, “Meet Your Printmaker.” All the work on display was made in printshops showcased on the excellent blog of the same name (which is edited by occasional Printeresting contributor Kevin O’Neill). The exhibit is a salon-style extravaganza of contemporary work by professional printers.
The honor roll of exhibiting print shops includes:
DWRI Letterpress, Dirty Hands Serigraphie, Bleu Acier, The Little Friends of Printmaking, Sycamore Street Press, Dieu Donné, Deep Wood Press, Standard Deluxe, Patent Pending, Outlaw Print Co., Erika Ebert Press, Cannonball Press, Atlanta Printmakers Studio, Common Press, Stumptown Printers, Slugfest Printmaking Workshop, Extrapool, Squid Ink Kollective, Tugboat Printshop, Lunalux, Purgatory Pie Press, The Firecracker Press, Thomas-Printers, Aesthetic Apparatus, The Lower East Side Printshop, Iskra Print Collective, Halo Halo Screen Printing, AS220 Community Printshop, Proyecto´ace, Elshopo, Low Rider Tee Shirt, Starshaped Press, Pinball Publishing, Uhrgalo, Sonnenzimmer, Punk Rock Payroll, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, Polluted Eyeball, Spudnik Press, Bob Eight Pop.
This is a broad survey, and the exhibit deserves praise for its inclusive curatorial vision. It’s all here, from the trivial to the sublime, and the presswork alternates between delicate and brutalist. While the work is not universally excellent, it’s all representative of some important current in contemporary printmaking. Kudos to the WPG for putting up this show, which may be a bit outside the Gallery’s usual comfort zone.
All in all, it was a Jolly Good Show! For information visit meetyourprintmaker; for images visit this Flickr set posted by the gallery. A few views of the exhibit follow the jump…
From Tugboat Printshop:
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
Color Woodcut Print by Paul Roden + Valerie Lueth, 2009.
I had the pleasure of seeing this beauty just last night! More on that later. Meanwhile, check out the fireworks at the Tugboat Printshop website, and some in-process views at the shop’s Flickr page.
Happy Independence Day!
“Following the same process as a digital printer, the human printer generates the printed product by hand. Throughout the printing process the human printer assumes the role of the machine.”
“Printer tests” and a few of the human printers themselves:
This is exactly like the legendary folk tale of John Henry, only with less tragedy, and more irony.
(Via todayandtomorrow, also spotted by famous tipster KVH!)
The Laser Cutter Blog is apparently some kind of online resource for interesting laser-cutting miscellany. Like this excellent laser-cut bookwork by Olafur Elliasson:
This link was suggested by a certain BFF of mine.
At Wired: the cover of Opium Magazine is a printed art project by Jonathan Keats, “a story that takes 1,000 years to read.”
San Francisco conceptual artist and journalist Jonathon Keats is trying to rejuvenate literature in the age of hyperspeed media by writing a story that will take a millennium to tell. The catch? The story, printed on the cover of the recently released Infinity issue of Opium Magazine, is only nine words long…
“Something essential is lost when ingesting words is all about speed. My thousand-year story is an antidote. Given the printing process I’ve used, you can’t take in more than one word per century. That’s even slower than reading Proust.”
The printing process in question is a simple but, as usual with Keats, pretty clever idea. The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.
It’s also worth reading the article’s comments section, for its mixture of insight and ignorance. (via)
DIY-ers! Behold the well-named, kookily disorganized Screenulacra:
Project Screenulacra explores and develops different possibilities in Silkscreening. We embrace the Do It Yourself approach. Working on visual and technical transformation of already existing elements and combining the individuality of secondhand clothes with the character of silkscreen printing. The Project shares knowledge through workshops and connections with other groups.
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.
