printing in the home studio…
I’ve been hard at work getting my home screenprinting (it’s one word for me) setup dialed in for another exhibition here in Polcenigo with the awesome people at La Taverna Slow Shop & Bar. I dropped some photo samples above, but if you’d like to see a much more extensive process of how everything was done check out my stories in evidence on instagram. I broke everything into 8 “chapters” from the first test print through the exhibition installation.
Documenting was tedious at first, but it quickly became baked into my printing process. Getting a setup dialed at home took some time, but overall I really enjoyed the process of making adjustments to get the best results possible using the minimal equipment I have here. If I show again I think I’ll just totally eliminate using the computer for anything. I’ve done some tests with sharpie and things like tape direct to transparency and I really love the feel.
The large prints are A2 size—and I used CMYK for everything just to keep it simple. I did darken the process yellow just a tad for one print. I also cut many of the test prints into a variety of v-fold cards and bookmarks to sell. I wrote an informal statement for the space, which I’ll paste below. I’ll probably make another post with documentation from inside the exhibition space, but for now here is the statement:
REITERATIONS | REITERAZIONI
This exhibition came as the result of anxious hours spent considering the role of individuals who make images, sound, and write in our shifting technological landscape. I’m speaking particularly about impacts Ai image and text generation platforms such as Chat GPT and DALL•E 2 are already having on our collective creative landscape. disclaimer: I don’t have answers as to what the future holds or how we should proceed—and this work isn’t an overt attempt to propose solutions. Sorry!
I’m a graphic designer with a passion for printmaking. I’ve always been drawn to creative processes that are analog and require movement of the body to perform. These processes can be broken down into steps and understood logically at a single human scale. Film photography and screenprinting (as you see here) are great examples. For me, there is a deeply calming satisfaction that comes as a result of breaking down a process, physically working with what is in front of you, and improving proficiency over time through repetition. In fact, this show is a greedy exploration of repetition just to see what kind of creative outcome would naturally be revealed—hence the name, Reiterations.
As we become more estranged from understanding how the tools we use to run our lives work, I find myself (as a maker at least) mourning the potential loss of process as we currently know it. This kind of process is a journey filled with messiness, unexpected interactions, difficulties, imperfections, slowness, and pleasant surprises that arise along the way. What you see here is the full documentation of a process that spanned two months. I worked steadily with the processing power of one human brain and two hands. You’ll probably notice the prints aren’t perfect—this is a direct result of the physical limitations navigated to produce large-scale, hand-printed work at home. There were many compromises, hacks, and work-arounds that give this work its own unique voice.
Now that I’ve sufficiently bashed technology, let me be a hypocrite and suggest you go to my instagram page @jarrederraj to see videos of how each print was made in my DIY garage studio! Thanks for reading and happy making, everyone.
—all prossima