The Proud and Brave in Chicago

After a deep breath, I sealed the box and sent She Has Neither and 78 for exhibition to Woman Made Gallery for the Suffra-Jetting Exhibition. It opens in two weeks, and I just might jump the plane and go for the opening. I haven't been to Illinois for a while and miss the place. 

However, I'm busy preparing for another exhibition in St Louis the week after, and chugging away at some new pieces. The work for this series is taking off, with no end in sight--either for opportunities or subject matter.

I'm glad a gallery is unabashedly showing She Has Neither. It's a tough piece and while everyone who's seen it is stunned by it, groups whose eyes have fallen on it have collectively gasped. It's sobering subject matter, and it needs to be addressed in unrelenting terms.

The interactive invitation to the exhibition in Chicago.

Argentina, after having a reproductive rights bill narrowly defeated two years ago, stands the possibility of a new bill with a new president in office. However, I find it appalling that the bill stands in balance of other motives.

From the NYT this week: “Considering he [President Alberto Fernández] is trying to take a more orthodox path when it comes to the economy, he is using other issues to calm the demands of his voters,” said Mariel Fornoni, a political analyst. 

So, what is the motivation, helping vulnerable women in a dire, desperate time or keeping his ass in office?

Pink. Just Pink.

As I put together my guerrilla campaign to hit the streets in the coming weeks, I moved to printing You're Next as color laser prints at my local copy shop. True, it's not the luscious 22 x 30" (56 x 76 cm)  from a wide-format ink jet printer, or the imposing 24 x 36 (61 x 91 cm) offset 2-color print, but I just don't have the funds to print any other way right now. It's going up as a tabloid-size.

A printer gave me quote for 500 copies of a 2-color print on a light-weight coated stock at 24 x 36 for $ 900. Not a bad price considering the ink coverage; and at 500 prints, the sheetfed is just making ready. The ppu is pretty good considering; I could run a crowd funder to pay for it, and it would include postage and the mailing tube. Promoting it could make it a hit, or an uphill battle.

I'll talk more about the distribution later, for now, the color.

The red from a laser printer would give me a peach-colored triangle when printed; the yellow comes out strongly in the lower opacity (see the top image). So, decreasing it, the pink will be accurate in the tabloid-size print. If I ever get the offset printed, I'd go with a spot color, and the lowered opacity would produce the pink I want. Just gotta be sure that I choose a cooler red.

For the distribution, I'm thinking I'll start in my little town, putting up some at night and see if I get a reaction. I have to reach out to contacts to find the spots with the traffic that would most respond to the image.

That's one of the most interesting things about this project. The climate in this country has turned so acrid and exclusionary. It has been revealing how people respond to the individual images. Each of the works are met by gasps--but the reaction comes only from a specific group, the one targeted by the piece.

My honest hope is that the message and its design resonate so deeply that we collectively do something about the crisis our nation is in. Never did I think that as a population we were harboring so much fear and hatred toward one another. In these times of accessible communication, couldn't we stop seeing one another as groups of "them" vs. "us"? It took someone with these feral emotions to capitalize on these fears in others; sadly, as a nation we've responded badly in not rejecting the rhetoric and ousting this shell of a human being from our highest office. We most certainly face his re-election if we don't unite and act.

78, the redesign......

Even when inspiration strikes, you sometimes have to take a step back and consider the entire work. With a long standing series such as DSH, there are a number of facets that require consideration before rushing off to print.

DSH has been in the works for over two years, and many various ideas have been developed, some shelved, some still in the incubator. News events dictate a lot of what is being said, however, mulling over the aesthetics is essential to the effectiveness of the final design.

78 Cents On the Dollar was originally a four-color image, set for printing via RISO in Newburgh, NY. There are RISO printing facilities in NYC--notably Blackburn--however, the press in Newburgh can handle the size and type of paper I intend to use.

RISO, as noted before, doesn't work in CMYK. It works on a series of inks more closely modeled on RGB and the results can be unpredictable--both a good and a bad thing.

Bringing the piece to so many colors didn't seem right in the face of the others in this series--and I felt it might look like an eye sore. I also felt that the color, while off-beat, might dilute the message. Since the works are all a little confrontational, I decided to omit all the colors and instead make the work in tints of black and the RISO red.

I spoke with the pressman, and I'll be reporting soon. In the meantime, images are below. In processing the files from Ai to Acrobat, the color shifts. I have to speak with the pressman again to see what the best format is. He said the files would print well as RGB PDFs, so I'll have to see what the best processing channel will be.