Yesterday, the employees of Chicago Silk Screen were nice enough to give some Lill St students a tour of their facilities. One of the oldest screen printing business in the city, Chicago Silk Screen is downright fascinating. Did you know that practically everything is silk screened? Plastic buckets, glass bottles, and a lot of those giant vinyl banners! And each of these objects requires it's own special screen.
Alan Shust, CSS production manager and our wonderful tour guide, took us through their process.
This is a room-sized camera englarger used to create the films needed to burn the screen. Before digital printing became popular, this is how all films were created. CSS has two of these devices which can make films 4' x 6' and larger!
Stretching a giant aluminum screen! That little device is a "tense-ometer" so that they know that the screen is stretched properly.
The team at CSS coats their screens a little differently than we do at Lill St: because they are preparing screens that will be used to make thousands and thousands of prints, the screens need extra emulsion. It was fun to talk shop with the pros! Here, Fransisco is coating screens used to print styrofoam coffee cups!
The screens are then burns on this beautiful Vacuum UV light table! (Swoooon...)
And rinsed in the washout station (we should BE so lucky!)
CSS also has a department that takes the used mesh out of old screens restretches them.
Stretching wood screen must be SOO much easier with that pneumatic staple gun!
The basement... where silk screens go to be reborn!
All in all the tour was FASCINATING. Thanks so much for the employees of Chicago Silk Screen for being so hospitable and thanks again to Alan Shust for being such a fantastic tour guide! If you have any printing needs, we highly recommend these guys! (Check out more photos from the tour at my flickr!)
Hi, Lill St Textiles Buddies! It's cold, wet and blustery out there today; and all I want to do is curl up in a cozy sweatshirt and drink tea. And guess what? In just a few weeks I'll be teaching a class all about sewing hooded sweatshirts! It's going to be a super awesome class that covers some basic patterning/construction techniques while also allowing you to get creative with design and structure. Here are a range of design ideas to get your brain working...
Super simple hoods with marsupial pockets! No need to get crazy if you're feeling intimidated by the sewing: a hand-made hoodie is creative enough! (Also- can we talk about those awesome pants for a second?!)
Check out that neck variation! It looks pretty comfy...
And even though we won't be doing any screen-printing in the class, my nerdy self couldn't let THIS discovery go without sharing it with you all. Clever, clever!
One week after moving to Chicago, I managed to land myself an art show! Thanks to my cousin's amazing girlfriend, and my new friend, Tory, I was invited to participate in a 24 hr project with opening to follow. Each participating artist was to bring all materials necessary to make work to a warehouse space near Chinatown and all work created during the night would be hung in the Nichole Villeneuve Gallery.
What I managed to miss by not reading the fine print of the waiver was that the artists were also responsible for providing tables and chairs. Oops.. good thing I found that chair lying around or it would have been a really long night. You know.. even longer than it was already.
The space was huge and beautiful. Apparently, this particular warehouse used to be owned by Al Capone. It was handily located right on the river... good for dumping bodies? Rumor has it that the basement and freight elevators are haunted! But we saw no evidence of it during our night there.
There were all sorts of artists: painters, sculptors, installation artists, and me: fibers
One of my goals for moving to Chicago was to get back into the studio in a really serious, conceptual way. For the past few years I feel like I've really only been touching upon projects- starting things without finishing them... not really taking the time to think things/concepts all the way through. I haven't, however, lost my crazy thirst for historical details: my most recent research topic has been FDR, the New Deal and the Great Depression. In keeping with that theme, here was the proposal I submitted to the curators of this show:
FDR’s New Deal programs and the American experiences during the Great Depression seem to me to be particularly enlightening in the context of the contemporary “Great Recession” and the global financial crisis.During the 24hr project, “Employed,” I plan on exploring the relationships between the Great Depression and the Great Recession through fibers techniques such as scrap quilting and embroidery:both techniques popularized by the necessary frugality of the hard times of the 1930’s.By utilizing text and images I hope to create a series of compositions that can act individually or as a series.
My research included everything from listening to FDR's fireside chats from the 1930's to reading Paul Krugman articles comparing the economics of the two time periods. But what I found most compelling were the hundreds of posters designed and printed by the Works Progress Administration between 1932 and 1943.
The WPA was the primary institution responsible for getting people back to work during the great depression. They did so by initiating thousands of community improvement projects across the US. Many of these were infostructure building: road construction, bridge construction, etc. But many of them were cultural. The WPA organized and provided funding for murals, musical concert, theater... anything you can think of. And their posters advertised them.
I especially loved the WPA posters that focused on the idea of the importance of work, itself.
I mean... first of all, way to glorify the working class. It just doesn't happen that often. But also, it's so true that being unemployed in a country that idolizes productivity is the difinitive road to depression. No wonder the Great Depression was so totally soul crushing, right?
Uhm, amazing poster much? Totes.
This next one was my favorite. It seemed to bring together all of my research with my personal situation of being an unemployed and unconfident artist with the title of the show, "Employed," with my research of both the past and the present.
What these posters really drove home to me was that the WPA wasn't only battling an economic depression... it was trying to assuage an emotional depression that was affecting the entire American population. Spirits had been hit so hard that fixing one was impossible without fixing the other. This was one of the main differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession that I chose to focus my work on: it seems like now, although times are tough, the American population has kept from sliding headfirst into an emotional pit. Consumerism (apparently the best way to guage people's spirits) is still fairly up. Apple is still releasing ridiculously priced sci-fi products and people are racing to get their hands on them. NPR is still featuring stories of individuals who, after being unceremoniously fired from their boring office jobs, took the "opportunity" to change careers- to become self employed or follow dreams they had never thought were possible.
See? Optimism! And Hence: a flourishing indy crafts movement. The contemporary independent crafts movement combines the comfort seeking nostalgia of handmade objects with the anti-establishment mentality of an unpopular war and the rampant excuse for capitalism that Americans feel is their constitutional right. (Okay, clearly my feelings about the crafts movement are many and varied. And I am admittedly a part of it... but for this project it serves as a complicated muse.)
For my work for the "Employed" show I decided to combine fabrics common to the indy craft movement with images and techniques from the Great Depression.
To me, the forthcoming pieces are a sort of hilarious paradox of domestic memorials (handmade objects that hang in the home) with the mass-produced popular fabric styles and the incongruous images from the WPA posters. Were these posters ever meant to hang in the home? Probably not. But now they can be remembered for the place they hold in America's heart. (I mean, everybody knows this history, right? Ha. Hence my point.)
I chose to leave the images empty for a few reasons: first, because I forgot how god-awful long it takes to embroider anything. I had planned to make maybe six of these compositions but I barely finished three. And second, because I really liked the visual competition of the fabric patterns and the images; like the past and the present were battling to be seen.
Ok, so it's clearly not a finished body of work. But I think there's potential here. I would love to continue the project and make a whole hell of a lot of these guys. I would LOVE any feedback that people have on these, too. Please? Criticism welcome? I need to get back into critique mode.. I've been a bit coddled lately. (Mostly by myself.) Bring it on.
So, a final word on the show experience:
Now, I've done 24 hr projects before... and not with the best success or enjoyment. But the difference between the show I did when I first moved to Philly and this one was that in this case we weren't trying to create collaborative work. When you're relying on other people- people you may not even know- to create a piece that will have your name on it... tensions tend to run very high in the middle of the night. Nichole's show allowed the artists to only feel responsible for their own work... which meant that the rest of the artists involved could be respite and community. I feel like I got to know a bunch of people in the area and see into their creative processes a little bit. It was really awesome.
I thinking Chicago's gonna work out, and I'm really excited to get involved with the art scene here. Too bad i'm leaving for a month in.. like 45 min. I guess I'll try to pick up with this project when I get back in July! In the meantime, stay tuned to the blog for Snow Farm 2010! A week with my amazing nephews! And trying to drive fast enough to escape my personal demons! (Wish me luck. Also safety.)
I'm a fiber artist and enthusiast stumbling through life outside of art school. My work explores the link between fibers history and contemporary politics, especially gender politics. I started this blog to keep myself in a critical discipline, and to keep myself actively writing about my work and the world around me. Thanks for reading!
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