Kickstarter--Yet Again

Without any nail biting and tapping on my experience and that of others, I launched a Kickstarter this evening to fund the printing of the VOTE Postcard I designed. 

I'm printing-on-demand, and my goal is large enough for me to print and mail the first batch and have a little left over to print a 22 x 17-inch letterpress of this image, and small enough to hopefully make goal.  

Allow me to explain: The idea of making a postcard--a mailed item--and using an image inspired by Robert Indiana's piece on a postage stamp--is the concept of the piece. 

I swiped the image to the left from an ETSY vendor who is offering 10 unused stamps for sale on their site. At such close range, it's fun to see the imperfections in the perforated tear; even in its reduced image state, the colors still vibrate after all these years.

Within minutes of launching I had two backers. Very exciting. 

What this has taught me, yet again, is how much text needs to be considered and edited when launching any kind of campaign. 

Parading it by colleagues, there was a bit of confusion about the meaning and purpose of the work;  others were concerned that I was encouraging people to participate in a system that just might lose their vote. I saw it as a way to send out a message relating to voting safely--by mail. 

Hope I make my goal. At $ 5.00--the price of a pledge--at a time, it could be a long road to $ 250.00. Yet another chapter in this journey.

Here's the postcard:

The Vote

No one is happy.

Everyone is on edge. Left and Right.

The vote by mail was an attempt to circumvent the pandemic which is still rampant; more on that later. People are worried that their vote--for or against--won't come or go as planned. Or discounted if not delivered according to a strict protocol. 

Friends have told me that they'll show up in haz-mat suits to vote if they've got any voting insecurity, but that's no one knows how that's going to go, either. 

So many months have gone by, flown like the wind, and we're less than 90 days till the fateful one. Biden is calm and has said that the election results will be determined by January 20th, and that's the day that the US Marshalls will, if necessary, vacate the office. 

Planned as a 2-color letterpress print.

I'm waiting for the reply from Robert Indiana's estate to publish the print, left. It's a play on the stamp made from his artwork from way back. It's very interesting that when he created the work in 1970, it was done as a gentle submission to his religious beliefs. 

A devout Christian Scientist from Indiana (Robert Clark is his real name), he created the artwork not as a nod to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but to the love that his beliefs required to extend to others. A very private man, he was miffed at the fame that the commercialization of his famous, famous art work brought him. Originally, it was a sculpture, and the original is housed in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

The original postage stamp was printed in color: the red letters with blue and green vibrating backgrounds. It has been reinterpreted in many sizes, materials and media over the decades, and my use of it travels on two avenues. The political one, obviously. But I am thrilled that the typeface used in the original sculpture is a form of Clarendon. How wonderful. 

For me, it's critical to keep the interplay on my message: that, in disrupting the mail delivery for the sake of the election, we must expect and demand that our vote be cast and delivered in a timely and decent matter.

However, many millions will be spent against this endeavor and ultimately hurt many millions of people. 

For example: many receive their medications by mail. Can they afford a two-week delay? What about people who send in their rent to their landlords. Will they be evicted if that check isn't delivered on time? 

While the pandemic has demonstrated how dependent we will be on electronic exchanges in the future, it has also shown the debilitating disadvantage of those who either don't have the technology or who depend on physical items to live. It puts in start relief how we've co-opted yet another public service.

Especially now, for corrupt and personal purposes of this president.

God Loves Guns

In an insane upheaval of events, our nation was thrown into a frenzy of disease, death, unemployment and poverty--in a word, horror--in a matter of weeks. Governors and mayors, with very little support from gutted public health departments at every level were left with no other choice than to lock down any and all states' public gathering areas--including most businesses, recreation areas, and all the etceteras.

Planned as a 2-color letterpress print
from polymer plate.

Abruptly, our country was held up to a horrific mirror: our level of disorganization for a crisis. It's painfully obvious we didn't learn much from the AIDS crisis, the 9/11 attacks or the Katrina Hurricane. We've played down the fact that health insurance is a need. Never addressed the inequalities of people of color with regard to health and human services, brushing their needs under the rug as a cultural issue  (as usual) rather than the exclusionary norm that has reached critical mass.

More than ever, we've exposed ourselves as a nation that lives paycheck to paycheck. If we can't sustain ourselves for 60 days without descending to homelessness and destitution, what does being great, becoming great or staying great mean? How absurd is this?

Yesterday, in Lansing Michigan, protesters entered armed with rifles entered the state office building demanding an end to the lockdown imposed by the governor. Egged on by the president to demand liberation, a female democrat was bullied by the president. Yelling angry white men with guns demanded the right to become sick from an illusive virus, about which we know so little and is still evolving.

Do we sustain ourselves in this country by tattoos, haircuts and beers? Apparently so. God and guns will keep us safe.

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.

The Peripheral Information

Watching the news--actually, at this point avoiding it--has become a project in itself. What is most annoying is the shifting realities; at the onset, the event didn't exist. Then, it never occurred.

With the admission that an event did, in fact occur, and that many, many people were involved in many, many incremental steps, the fact that our country has asked another to lie on international TV is being deemed a not-so-bad thing. An overreaction. Oh brother. I can't take it. Just can't.

This astonishing chain of events is leaving me with considerable unease and hence, the very stuff to concentrate on other things. Angst is a great catalyst for experiment.

I follow the media about the pay gap between men and women, especially in this time of "the lowest unemployment in US history". In 2019, according to

https://www.payscale.com/data/gender-pay-gap

women's pay has grown, in 2019, a whopping $ .01 to $ .79 on the dollar. So, my piece is obsolete.

[I could change the 78 for 79 without much hassle, but it's printing this week. I'll keep you posted on that.]

What I find far more annoying, but not surprising, is that, in CONTROLLED instances--job title, years of experience, industry and location--women still make less than a man at $ .98 on the dollar. 

You might think that's not too bad, right? What's a lousy 2 cents? Well, that "tiny" gap occurs when a woman actually reaches that salary level. If a woman finally makes it up that hill to reach the same status as a man in the same job, she still makes less than he does. 

The website explores minority women, who make less of all. Check this out: A Black  female executive earns $0.63 for every dollar a White male executive earns. In other words, a Black female executive earns 27 percent less than a White male executive. 

I'll be writing soon on an article I saw in this week's NYT, that relates to ICE, immigrants and the working poor throughout the Deep South. Turns out that poor minority workers are snapping up dangerous jobs in chicken processing plants that were left behind by the deported alien workers. They're happy to get $ 11.00 an hour to gut hens because it beats out the $ 4.50 an hour they get at a Sonic. $ 4.50? Is this for real?

OK, let's talk about prints:

78 Cents, as reported months ago on

https://democracyspokenhere.blogspot.com/2019/05/78-cents.html

has undergone a considerable re-design, for a number of reasons. First of all, I decided the color was ineffective, so I reduced it, and the colors of the upcoming pieces to two: red and black. It just works out better that way. Besides, it was fun to make two colors look like many, playing with the densities. The battered old penny, turning greenish red as its value further dissolves, transformed seamlessly.

RISO colors, the final destination of the file, works with colors that are like CMYK but not. To the left is the scale, taken from Secret Riso Club's website; the paper sample looks wooly, but it remains to be seen how this will print. I have a feeling it could go on for a while.

Here's the latest print iteration:
There's a lot of space around it because I've included the 1" border; and it looks rather dull here in the upload. I'm hoping that it will print as vibrantly as the .pdf or the .AI doc shows.

What's interesting about RISO printing is that the production phase requires the plates be separated, and I'm wondering what the steel graphic will turn into. I'm waiting to hear back from the pressman to see when I could go up there, possibly with a computer to adjust the file. The steel grain might need work, which, at a print shop, I'd like to avoid. Dying to see this.

Happy New Year to all.