More DIY high tech printers

Adding to my collection of website stories about people's great DIY printers - here is a link to one prints images on toast.

In addition to their sublimely ridiculous toast printer, the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory website also has a posting about a sugar printer which they built for about $500 which prints 3D objects. The printer's creators were inspired by a show of Rachel Whiteread at the Tate Modern - and enormous installation of white cast boxes, which resemble sugar cubes. The Tate's website has a great video of the installation being created in time lapse video. Whiteread has often come up in curatorial discussions at Philagrafika as an artist who works with multiples and works from a variety of matrices, for example her watertower project.

Here is the toast being printed:

Cardboard Carpets

One of my favorite materials to screenprint on is cardboard. (As part of an installation at the ICA last year, Space 1026 printed over 3,000 shingles of recycled cardboard!) So, I was immediately drawn to this design idea of printing cardboard with designs to create cardboard carpets by Wendy Plomp on the Free People blog today. An entirely new idea for urban installations - creating beautiful patterns, laying them out in the street and creating your own living room outside!

And, when you are finished laying out your carpet you could furnish your outdoor street installation with cardboard furniture by Cardboard Robot.

Here are some more links to blogs about the cardboard carpets

Wendy Plomp design site and another blog with article after seeing her in Domus magazine
http://www.wnd.nu/works/show/64/message-in-a-box.html

http://bloesem.blogs.com/bloesem/2008/01/message-in-a-bo.html

A Small Call for Entry

Small print shows happen all over the world - part of the nature of print, but I just came across an interesting call for entries for a print show at possibly the smallest gallery I've ever heard of.

As part of the 2008 Southern Graphics Council Conference at Virginia Commonwealth University the Locker 50B is seeking print entries. In March Locker 50B celebrates it's sixth year with "Inkling", a print exhibition, will be installed for that month in conjunction with the Southern Graphics Conference. Please note, no entries can be more than 4" in diameter.

Locker 50B homepage

Article in the Washington Post

Call for Entry

Southern Graphics Council Conference

By the way, Peter Nesbitt and Shelly Bancroft from Art on Paper will be the conference keynote speakers. The conference runs March 26-29, 2008 in Richmond, Virginia.

Reproduction Controversy in the News

Two exhibitions are sparking controversy and raising questions about the power of the print about Jacob Lawrence and his seminal work, The Migration of the Negro which completed in the 1940s. Triple Candie and the Whitney both have exhibitions up - the Triple Candie show is raising controversy in that they are showing the entire series as reproductions while the Whitney is showing only 17 of the 60 images. Lawrence conceived of the series as one work. The debate is interesting in that the reproductions shown in their entirety are more powerful than the singular images removed from their original context. Somehow, the ghost of Walter Benjamin's aura argument continues to circle.

Related Links
Triple Candie exhibition: Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of the Migration of the Negro by Jacob Lawrence

"Visions of a People in Motion" by Holland Cotter, New York Times, December 28, 2007

Whitney Museum exhibition

And The Trains Kept Coming Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Series on Tour funded by NEA

Jacob Lawrence at the Phillips Collection in DC

other blogs on exhibition
greg.org

Printed Image in the West, an Online History

I came across a lovely resource this morning in my search for material relating to the teaching of the history of Graphic Arts. For a little background, I am particularly interested in the lack of this curriculum in the US - and realize that I was lucky at the University of New Mexico to have taken O.J. Rothrock's, History of Graphic Art. I am collecting syllabi from classes that I do find, and if you come across any - please send them to me at cperkins@philagrafika.org

The Printed Image in the West: History and Techniques
put together by Wendy Thompson from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Drawings and Prints, includes wonderful illustrations and has information on woodcut, engraving, etching, drypoint, mezzotint, aquatint and lithography.

Two Views of the Head, 1746; Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty (French, 1716–1785) Plate 4 of Myologie complète en coleur et grandeur naturelle; Multiple-plate color mezzotint; Plate: 16 3/8 x 12 3/4 in. (41.6 x 32.4 cm)