NY Magazine Weddings Spring 2012
'Dragonfly meets Bear' featured in NY Magazine Weddings Spring 2012 issue
'Dragonfly meets Bear' featured in NY Magazine Weddings Spring 2012 issue
Our very own Patrick Fenton, one half Swayspace partner and one whole design fanatic, was interviewed for the online article What the Beep? Why Digital Sounds Are so Annoying appearing on the blog LiveScience. Check him out!
You may recall that last year we were involved in the Art of Craftsmanship Revisted in conjunction with LVMH and Parsons. Out of that lovely curated show on Governors Island, we were picked as one of the subjects of a new book of artisans in New York that was recently featured in the New York Times. Swayspace is the “letterpress print shop” whose wood type is featured in the Times article:
We are so pleased at the book that Nathalie and Ted Sann have created and so excited to be included with so many skilled artisans. Made in New York is a reminder of the craftsmanship still being made today in New York City (especially in Brooklyn!). We’ve already got our copy, but you can pick yours up on Amazon right now!
We did it BIG this year!!
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been getting ourselves sorted out to present our work at two of New York’s premier wedding events: Wedding Crashers and New York Magazine Weddings. We’ve shed blood, sweat and tears (well, not tears but…) designing and printing pieces for the events. One piece is a 5 color, 2 sided recipe card and acts a guide for couples looking to order wedding invitations
and the other is a 3 color press kit, reminiscient of a vintage book
(we’ll be sharing blog posts on both of these soon).
We conceived of two different booth designs that represented us well and suited each event to a tee.
Here are a selection of photos from the two events, starting off with Wedding Crashers:
…And now to New York Weddings:
After all that preparation, each event really went swimmingly. We made some great contacts with other folks in the wedding industry, met some lovely brides and grooms who were very complimentary of our work and we’re ready to get on with all the designing and printing we have lined up.
Whether we’re translating a photograph from digital to polymer media, printing with chocolate powder or on wood veneer, we’re always interested in combining the old and new, marrying the tradition of letterpress with modern innovations that suggest new expressive possibilities.
printed from photopolymer plate at Swayspace
detail of dot pattern created for translation from digital to polymer
For more inspiration on how to creatively push the medium, check out Printin’, one of two print exhibitions currently on view at MoMA as part of their twenty year survey of the role of the print in contemporary art.
Curated by the artist Ellen Gallagher, Printin’ displays Gallagher’s epic print portfolio DeLuxe alongside works by artists of varying disciplines and time periods, all of whom use printmaking in ways that both celebrate and challenge the medium. Filmmakers, sculptors, collage artists, print makers and designers appear side by side in this show, linked by a shared drive to push beyond the perceived conceptual and physical limitations of the print.
Gallagher's print portfolio, "DeLuxe"
Ellen Gallagher
Two (of many) favorites from the show include Alois Auer’s bat and snakeskin impressions, created by pressing the objects between two lead plates and inking them, and a spread from Rodchenko and Stepanova’s USSR in Construction. But there are plenty of inspiring and curious works in the show, on view through May 14 in The Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries, 2nd floor.
It sometimes seems like the contemporary art world is intent on spreading the word that hand work, craft & technique are not only beside the point of fine art, but actually stand in the way of it. Budding artists are often encouraged by their MFA’d mentors to either eschew the development of hand skill altogether or to look forward to employing assistants or craftspeople as executors or surrogates for their carefully nurtured concepts.
While artists like Warhol and Koons made themselves famous by advertising and celebrating their physical detachment from their work, others commission outside experts only when their ideas reach beyond the limits of their own native physical skills.
The artist Ed Rusha, who first gained art world cred in the 1960s his text paintings and artist books, combines high concept and high craft, hiring experts to take over when his projects demand it.
Check out the making of Ruscha’s 2002 artist book, Me and The, produced at USF Graphicstudio in Florida. The team was challenged to innovate contemporary adaptations of the ancient tradition of fore-edge painting to complete Ruscha’s book. Their attention to detail and the complexity of the process is pretty inspiring to watch.
Love is in the air, or at least the smell of ink and California Wash. Yes! We’ve been busy bees in recent weeks, designing and printing a fabulous collection of sweetheart cards.
From Top Left Clockwise: Loves Me/Loves Me Not, Mini Love Blind, The Girls, Mini Sweetheart Note Set
Varied in style and sentiment, there will be an occasion where one of these is going to work in your favor!
From Top Left Clockwise: Mini Shadows Of Love, Mini Mittens, The Ol’ Ball And Chain, Love Blind Heart
From Top Left Clockwise: Figures Of Love, BIG Feeling, Mini Heart, Shot Through The Heart
Guess where they’re being sold? Only in our BRAND SPANKING NEW STORE! Where you can buy ephemera for all manner of occasions, here look:
So there it is, check out the store and buy some cards for your loved ones, or not so loved ones.
For years, we’ve been using the same bases here at Swayspace. We’ve always preferred the Bunting bases for the amount of truly specific control they allow us to correct and highlight certain areas of what are essentially photographic images. We have, however, also been limited by these bases. We have been using 2 bases that are 11 ¼” x 12 ½”, and 1 base that is 6 1/8” x 9 1/8” and on the one hand have played a tessellation game to create larger pieces than we would normally do for SP-20 and on the other have struggling to find a place for our guide pins on our C & P.
And though we put out many cool works, we still felt limited by the size. Well, no more! We figured it was time to hit the extremes and get the biggest base our Vandercook could handle and the smallest base we could get for the C & P.
pretty good, for a block of wood
We had already experimented with printing from larger than normal surface areas when we collaborated with Lite-Brite Neon We used a wood base that had the text carved into it. We then knew how big we could get, but we wanted to print big and perfectly. So we saved our nickels and dimes, turned in all our soda cans, and sold lemonade on the street to allow us to purchase a beautiful papa of a magnet, coming in at 18 ¼” x 24”
Practically filling the bed of the Vandercook, we can now put a plate anywhere we want! And more than that, we can finally print the posters and other large forms we’ve been dreaming of in our spare time. We felt that with our involvement with NYWI, now was the perfect time to explore just how far we could go with large form letterpress. Just having a base that size to play with opened up a whole new world of ideas for our designers, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve come up with in the next few months.
We don’t want to belittle our little base, it is just as fantastic and ferocious despite it’s 2” x 4” stature. We often print envelopes or projects where the paper is cut to size on the C & P, and you can have a devil of a time trying to make sure your pins don’t hit your base. Remember the bunting bases are precise and delicate and can be smashed and mashed much like lead type. But now we’re going to retire our battle scarred base and replace it with our new Tiny Ajax! We’re finally going to have the flexibility to print almost anything we want almost anywhere. And it’s just so cute too.
Don’t think our old bases are going to waste though. We’ve put them on our recently refurbished SP-15 which we can’t wait to try out on some full wedding suites. The dream of having all the machines here running simultaneously is finally upon us. We’ve expanded our shop, we’ve hired more designers, we’ve found some great printers, and now our only limits are the limits of our imagination and the imaginations of our next generation of printers.
In June of this year, we were invited to participate in a letterpress show for a project called New York Writes Itself.
New York Writes Itself (NYWI) is an amorphous creative production where the inspiration is created not by one person, rather an entire city of potential scribes. Overheard conversations, glimpsed interactions or in-your-face encounters all form the ever growing script. A scribe is described by NYWI as “observational and in touch with the people of New York”, it can be ANYONE in short, and these recorded moments are simply submitted by logging on to the NYWI site and filling out a form.
The show we are in is called New York Types and is a celebration of NYC Letterpress community and the people of NYC. This particular chapter of the NYWI production serves as an ideal description of what NYWI is all about; the spoken word or observed daily life experience of a fellow New Yorker forming the impetus for creativity in whatever form it may take, in this case amazing letterpress posters.
Given the opportunity to be a part of this, we jumped at the chance to give life to the individual voices and views of the city and life in New York. Each Swayspacer created a poster based on selected scripts from NYWI and each designer put his/her own spin on the script creating what is an exciting and colorful addition to the show.
Here’s Willy, crankin’ out some posters:
In addition to the ten editions of posters, we also produced a large scale group poster to which we each contributed drawings.
You can see the full posters at the show, which opens Dec 15 at the Art Director’s Club in New York. More info about the project is here, and you can RSVP for the event here. The pieces are also available for purchase on the NYWI website.
See you there!
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