- Coming up next,
we look at the word itself
as an art form.
- The last impression you had
of letterpress printing
might have been in history class
but artists today are using
this nearly forgotten technique
to reinvent their work.
- In Colorado Springs,
an exhibition featuring local,
national, even international letterpress artists
showcase just how versatile this medium can be.
- Kate takes us to the UCCS Gallery of Contemporary Art.
(humming of machinery)
- Letterpress printing is the slow,
tactile way to engage in printing
and language that's an antidote
to our digital world.
- The tar, the ink has a smell,
you have to stand up.
You have to roll,
you use all your senses to print
and it's quite amazing.
- I was just hooked immediately.
- From that moment that you pull the paper off,
it's just like this gift
or like opening a gift
or this act of discovery.
It's an exhilarating experience
when you pull that print.
- [Judith] Every print will look different.
There's a texture
and it's not perfect.
- Most of the people I know have
some sort of letterpress origin story
and for me it was
discovering presses and type
that were kind of abandoned
in the printmaking shop
in my undergraduate program
and just being fascinated by
how these machines worked
and the production process
and just the materials themselves being beautiful.
(gentle music)
There's something that's meditative
about setting type.
You become really focused
in this way that kind of
drowns out the world around you.
- I like printing.
I just love it.
I just turn off every device.
It's my zen moment.
Just print.
- Letterpress dates back to I think
that fact that we're all taught in elementary school
about the invention
of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440
and then that was the establishment
of using moveable type
and order production of books,
paper ephemera, broadsides, handbills.
- [Judith] And then there was the Industrial Age
plate on plate
and then to go a bit faster
like a cylinder on plate
and then it goes cylinder on cylinder to
go faster and faster for newsprint for example.
So we lost a lot of quality.
- And that production process actually continued
pretty late into the 20th century
and that's when many institutions
sold off quite a bit of their letterpress materials
because of the movement to digital production
and there was a resurgence of letterpress
as more of an artisanal form
or an experimental form.
Headed into the 1980s and 90s
because of the surplus of
cheap, accessible materials.
(gentle music)
- The advent of moveable type
the democratizing of communication,
that's all embedded in this show.
- I was looking at this exhibition
and thinking about people who are either
doing something interesting
with the method of printing itself
or with some of the historic visual language
of the forms.
- I think it gives a very good variety of
what's going on at the moment in letterpress.
- We have Amos Kennedy printing these
super cheeky amazing broadsides
and just playing with that historic broadside
poster form that we're all really familiar with
and then Anne Luben works in the same vein
where she's blowing up the broadside
into these huge quilted constructions
that kind of create these larger than life narratives.
And then David Wolske is more on the technical side
with the printing process
where he's created this process
he calls isotype printing
that allows him to print only one isolated area
of the piece of type
and then Judith Poirier
with her printing on film,
I don't know anyone else who's doing that.
- [Kate] Judith began printing
directly on 16 millimeter film
as an experiment.
When she ran it through a projector,
to her surprise,
the machine played the ink
on the soundtrack area of the film.
- The soundtrack area on the film
is more or less here
so whatever is printed on this area
would be read by the telecine or the projector.
It will read the variations of light
and it will give the sound.
Like this will go (humming).
It's quite funny,
it's almost Beethoven.
I like to work with abstractions
and the beauty of the letters
and the rhythm.
(humming of projector)
- I began as a textile artist
also working in print making media.
All my pieces began as plain white cotton cloth
and then on top of that
I build using predominantly natural dyes
sourced from plants
and then on top of that
I layer it with marbling techniques and monoprint
letterpress printings,
screen printing
and then also cyanotype
which is like a photo sensitive print process
using the sun.
- And then we have our two local presses
that are represented.
Ladyfingers Letterpress
with their series of protest posters
representing freedom of the press
and the power to have the press
as a representation of your own voice
and then the project from Colorado College
that's part of this national project
called For Freedoms
about protecting sacred Native American spaces.
I think people feel connected to the symbolic history
of what a press has meant
as the power to distribute information.
It's the power to have your voice heard.
- I think it's the 21st century
and it's fun to do things that
talks to you now
but with this old process.
Like to reinvent the tradition in a way.
- It's not presses sitting in a museum all lined up
or type sitting unused in a case.
It's people who are showing their love
and appreciation for this craft
by learning about it
and carrying it forward into the future.
(ambient music) - So I've got some friends
who are great letterpress artists.
- Oh fun. - I love going to their studio
and kind of seeing their process.
- Absolutely, yeah.
Just like what Judith said,
it's the smell of the ink
and the whirring of the machines,
it's this totally visceral experience.
- And I love seeing how
artists have changed their own narrative
of their work. - Yeah.
- And made it their benefit.
- It's very inspiring.