PAST SERVICES

Posters, Prints, Poster-Booklets – One Every Day, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, Nov. 5 – Dec. 21, 2009

We have a large number of posters from Temporary Services, Half Letter Press, Mess Hall and several of our side projects — Dispensing with Formalities, Public Collectors, Let’s Re-Make, Street Rec., The Free Store, The Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, Learning Site, and individual curatorial efforts — in this exhibition.

We made a new poster-booklet for Half Letter Press that people can take for free. Click image or here to download.

Click to enlarge

EFA Project Space is pleased to present One Every Day, on view from November 5 through December 19, 2009. The exhibition foregrounds the relationship of printed ephemera to cultural and artistic production, and marks the curatorial debut for Printeresting.org.

Launched in 2008, the founders of Printeresting.org aptly coined it “The Thinking Person’s Favorite Online Resource for Interesting Printmaking Miscellany.” Recognizing it as exactly that, EFA invited Printeresting to organize an exhibition that would open during New York City Print Week 2009, expanding the discourse about print beyond its fine art boundaries into the “every day”.

From the detritus under the windshield and the debris in our pockets to gig posters mounted on telephone poles, One Every Day attests that all varieties of print ephemera share the following three characteristics: fleeting function, low-cost means of production, and the fact that somebody out there loves them.

Presenting work by twenty-five artists and designers, the curators proclaim: “The universe of ephemera is expansive, and so is the work in One Every Day. The viewer will be treated to books, pamphlets, zines, stickers, merchandise, and other artifacts, but also subtle minimalist explorations, conceptual activism, and post-punk rock promotion. Similarly, the goals of our contributors are diverse: highly personal and comedic explorations of youth culture rest easily alongside overt critiques of consumer waste.”

Some artists in the exhibition imitate and glean from existing printed matter, appropriating popular forms of communication to transform their meaning. Stephanie Syjuco’s Color Theory Communication Transference is a re-creation of a community board from People's Park, Berkeley, CA. Using a process she calls “color averaging, ” the artist color codes the posts based on category, resulting in an isolated color coded object absent from the original content. Kate Bingaman-Burt’s foray into obsessive consumption involves drawing everything she buys, including the receipts and bills, all of which are then compiled in the format of artists books.

Other works are created with the intention of being placed in the public domain, such as Geoff Hargadon’s Cash for Your Warhol, a suite of roadside signs created in the same font as the ubiquitous Cash for Your Houses signs. These signs, reproduced in Warholian colors, were placed in front of major museums. Reversely, Lydia Diemer creates a personal space out of public material. She will build a distinct three-dimensional environment within the gallery, constructed entirely from printed ephemera.

Concerned with public interaction and the act of exchange, the Chicago artist collective Temporary Services will have all of the posters they have produced on display, along with a takeaway stack of posters created specifically for this exhibition. Additionally, Carlos Motta will provide several publications for the taking- including Gigantic, a large sampling of images from popular news media, each image removed off of the top reveals a new image beneath, the only way to experience all of the images in the stack is collectively throughout the show.

Many of these artists create objects for the same reasons ephemera have always been created: an efficient mode of production and distribution allows access to the widest possible audience. This is the goal of anyone with an idea to share, an agenda to promote, a culture to subvert, or yes, even a product to advertise: as seen in Post-Typography’s show poster screenprinted on silver mylar balloons, and the work of Gary Kachadourian, who commodifies his art as cheap consumer products sold at bargain-basement prices to maximize distribution.

Printeresting.org is an online resource for all things print related. From “fine art” prints and limited edition multiples to xeroxed flyers and cheap inkjet printouts, they take a broad view of printmaking; all manner of printed matter has a place at Printeresting. Authored by multiple contributors, the site features regular posts on a range of print-related content, including artwork, news, reviews, technology, and critical discourse. While their primary goal is to highlight innovative print work, the site is also a place to keep abreast of developments in the field, and to take note when printmaking intrudes into popular culture. The site’s growing collection of posts form the web’s most comprehensive, searchable database of contemporary print. Printeresting is for artists, designers, printers, curators, collectors, teachers, students, and the generally curious.

The originators of Printeresting.org and the One Every Day exhibition are Amze Emmons, R.L. Tillman, and Jason Urban.

Printeresting

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts