Q & A

In a variety of past lives I’ve worked as a graphic designer, a commercial illustrator and also an art director for advertising. These roles all involved print based outcomes, but it was time spent in publishing–as a pre-press operator and production manager–that really introduced me to the skills of digitally preparing image information for print. Coming much later to contemporary art, I found it helpful to draw on these practical skills as I began to form an artistic vocabulary.

Both practice and theory have supported my ongoing attraction to the medium of print. From a practical perspective, I feel an embodied sense of being ‘inside’ an image when I’m crafting and caring for the light and dark information that will eventually translate into a printed output. Accompanying this digital control of image information–like all printmakers I’ve ever talked to–I’m also completely seduced by the subtle contingency of material relationships that seem to magically collect into printed images. From the perspective of theory, I’ve become more and more aware of the art historical influence of print process. From Walter Benjamin’s critique on authenticity; to Sherri Levine’s postcarded reconsideration of encountered presence; and again in the appropriated deconstruction of Liechtenstein’s painted explosions, it’s easy to trace the significant role that print process has played in forming contemporary ideas around art.

With my printmaking I like to quietly explore ways of seeing that are quite personal to me. Sometimes this involves comparing cultural perspectives from my Vietnamese and Irish heritage, and other times this process is self-referential to the experience of engaging with digital image reproduction. At the moment I’m particularly interested in how technology has evolved to levels where visible traces of image reproduction have effectively disappeared. This interest is reflected in my recent work with silkscreen printing and large format outdoor LED panels–both forms of imaging technology that functionally suspend images somewhere between high resolution source input–and an output of graphically abstract representation. In this ongoing work I’m still surprised at the continuing capacity of print to summon newer and newer perspectives.

I tend to consider the form of printmaking in terms of the job at hand. Currently I’m making prints from generic landscape views–often desktop screensaver images that have been shared on the internet. I like to joke that choosing a printmaking form was easy because it is hard to go past a method that is literally called ‘screenprinting’, but in truth arriving at this option was a slow development.

Initially the speed and convenience of digital outputs like inkjet and laser were helpful for building on established ideas of appropriation and rephotography. It was only later, when I really began to appreciate the necessary mechanical transformation of print production, that screenprinting became more and more valuable as a method. In screenprinting the required and visible conversion of image information into halftone patterns introduced a world of functional syntax that invited exploration. Over time this has helped me develop novel methods of reassembling image information that interestingly align with my personal relationships to non-western and Zen ways of perceiving landscape.

I spend a lot of time exploring how digital image information is prepared for print. In everyday life this aspect of image reproduction often goes unnoticed. Think for example of the last time you were viewing something on-screen and needed a hard copy–current desktop technology can make this very complex printing task seem almost effortless or invisible. With my practice I like to call attention to these types of unthinking thresholds of perception. Sometimes this involves simple digital pre-press tasks like scaling or cropping–but I also embrace really challenging processes like digitally inventing custom halftone patterns or using machine-learning software to interpolate images with copies of itself. In this way digital technology is an active and considered part of my work, either functioning subtly behind the scenes, or overtly as a method to call attention to print process and the eventual act of reading a printed image.

This question gets a smile out of me because negotiations about multiples and copies and reproductions and ‘unique’ originals can still lead to some fiery differences of opinion.

I like to create multiples of the work I make. I don’t really approach this in terms of ‘editioning’ a print, rather I’ll often make two or three instances of a work because I’m interested in the resulting dialogue created within the work. Sometimes I’ll present paired ‘instances’ of a work side-by-side as a way to include the physical and conceptual distance between them as part of the work. For me making multiples references a world of shared and networked images that can never be regathered.

I appreciate how printmaking and publishing have historically revolutionised the distribution of ideas. And it’s easy to understand why a medium that deals primarily with text and communication would be adopted for protest and activist messaging. In my practice however, I’m not attracted to overt messaging that might argue for one perspective over another. Instead, I lean toward work that is open–meaning that I hope it invites audiences toward their own experience and interpretation.

That said I’m always working with referenced content, a process that unavoidably arrives with political implications.

I have lots of artists that I think about when I’m making work. I’m grateful to have studied paradigm shifting ideas like Douglas Crimp’s curatorial writing on ‘Pictures’ and Sherri Levine’s related work with appropriation and (re)presentation. It’s a conceptual line that I trace back even further to 1917 and the famous repurposing of a urinal. The story of a toilet transfigured into art endures for me as a timeless ah-ha moment, and more recently has even continued to 'fountain' new meaning because of it's contested authorship and fresh attribution to artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In fact Fountain - the title of the first work from One Three Collective - offers a respectful nod to this pivotal and contentious work.
On a more personal level it’s impossible to overlook my own small group of friends who are practising artists. The opportunity to openly discuss work while it is still in progress is a treasured source of influence.

I recently re-listened to an interview with Jerry Saltz, art writer for New York Magazine, and he made the humorous observation that the idea of a lone artist is like the idea of one ant - it doesn’t exist - get out there and collaborate!

I’m really enjoying participating in the experimental print group One Three Collective. I appreciate how the title of the collaborative project suggests that ‘one’ may not always lead to ‘two’, but rather, with collaboration, ‘one’ may perhaps make the leap to ‘three’.

I really do love printmaking–but I’m not psychopathic about it. For instance I don’t walk around in a self-made hand-printed T-shirt that reads ‘I (heart) printmaking’. I do however advocate for the conceptual and material value that printmaking processes bring to contemporary art. And even though I don’t believe in the artistic sport of medium specificity, I am often surprised by how quickly print process is dismissed as a means to an end–rather than a world of technique and creative potential.