Printmaking Process
The process of screen printing is involved and labor intensive. Printmaking in general can be very tedious and methodical. I mainly work with the medium of serigraphy or screen-printing.
In creating a print, I start out by taking the photographs or making a drawing. After I have the image, as I want it to be in the finished print, I have it printed out onto a sheet of clear film ending up with a large positive of the image. This positive image is then placed inside an exposure unit, which is used to transfer the image onto a silkscreen coated with a light sensitive photo emulsion. I then create paper stencils by hand cutting all the tiny details with an xacto knife.
I use the stencils and begin the physical process of printing.
The skies are always printed first using a monoprint technique. I use paintbrushes and spatulas to paint, dab, and scrape the vivid colors onto to the screen to be printed. Each sky varies sometimes slightly and sometimes drastically. I use a tool called a squeegee to push the ink through the open areas of the stenciled screen. There is lots of prep work and clean up in between each run, using a powerwasher to clean the screen.
The final step is printing the photographic image over the stenciled sky and blocks of color.
Immersive Installation Process
The ability to combine storytelling with building to create completely immersive environments that physically bring the audience into imagination, strikes me at my core and is what I enjoy most about creating within installation format. Through constructing of spatial visions, I can see the underside’s true form of an object to be re-imagined in a new context. Keeping in mind the accessibility of visual information to viewers, considering space, light, sound, and being aware of the balance of sensory information is constantly kept in mind. Composition, cohesion of narrative with visual components, and thinking of how the audience will interact, manipulate, and possibly damage each working part is something to consider. I have experienced the production, collaboration, direction , collection, conception, construction, the problem solving, spontaneity and controlled, planned chaos of working in this way. Physical and mental endurance, dreaming, visualizing, expanding ideas out and condensing them back is continuous. Communal creation is part of the process. My influences are vast and include childhood memories, fort building and clubhouses, natural history museums, roadside vernacular architecture, home improvement projects, children’s museums, science and art museums, revisionist history, and Infinite Imagination.
The future is collective experience and the recognition that we are all part of a global consciousness. I’m here in the interior of America, trying to push boundaries of the perception of art and re-contextualizing of how people interact with the world in real time, present tense, outside of the confines of virtual computer headspace.
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