Thanks so much to everyone who came out to the opening reception on March 10 and the SGCI reception on March 16. We’ve been thrilled to receive such enthusiastic feedback about Object Play.

Objects on the Horizon by Christopher Michlig and Continua by Katie Murken

Tumbling E (Sculpture) by Christopher Michlig

Scultpures and collages by Christopher Michlig, selection of prints from the Vista Sans Wood Type Project

The SGCI Conference Reception on Friday, March 16 was a particularly great event. With such a wealth of art and print related offerings in the St. Claude Arts District that night, we were thrilled to have such full crowd of printmakers, educators, and students from the conference make the show a stop along their way. Add the healthy mix of local folks who came out and we had such a full crowd that we ended up keeping the gallery open late.

(L to R) Yuka Petz, Mary Phelan, Patty Smith, Tricia Treacy, Angela Driscoll, Lara Henderson

The SGCI Conference brought together a mini reunion of faculty and alumni from the Book Arts and Printmaking MFA program at University of the Arts. Tricia Treacy, of the collaborative team who organized the Vista Sans Wood Type Project, was able to fly down from Philadelphia for the conference and reception.

Co-curator Angela Driscoll talks with visitors to the show

Viewing a selection of prints from the Vista Sans Wood Type Project

Special thanks to Press Street’s Antenna Gallery for hosting the events. Don’t miss out on the last month of films and other programming before Antenna disembarks from their current location.

“Another clever, colorful experience awaits art fans at Press Street’s Antenna Gallery, a cooperative gallery on Burgundy Street in the Bywater.”

Thanks to Georgia Kennedy at NolaVie for the lovely review of OBJECT PLAY. Read the full article here.

OBJECT PLAY
on view at Press Street’s Antenna Gallery
March 10-April 8

Gallery Opening & Reception:
Saturday, March 10, 2012
6:00pm to 9:00pm

SGCI Conference Reception:
Friday, March 16, 2012
6:30pm – 10pm

OBJECT PLAY, curated by SIFT co-founders Angela Driscoll and Yuka Petz, explores the relationships between text, image, and object. Artists Katie Murken, Christopher Michlig, and collaborators Tricia Treacy and Ashley John Pigford, manipulate objects through the process of making.

In Continua, Katie Murken uses chance and probability to determine pigment dye colors of phone book columns. The accompanying broadsides describe the system behind this game of chance.

Continua (detail), by Katie Murken

In his series of works entitled The Long Range, Christopher Michlig tranforms text into objects of positive and negative space.

Objects on the Horizon, sculpture by Christopher Michlig

The Vista Sans Wood Type Project is a collaborative experimental project and print exchange coordinated by Tricia Treacy and Ashley John Pigford. The project combines technologies by using a CNC router to create wood type for letterpress printing.

Type for the Vista Sans Wood Type Project

Artist Bios:
KATIE MURKEN seeks out alternative contexts through which her work can engage with a broad community of viewers and participants.  Trained as a printmaker and book artist, Murken coordinates site-specific installations that position her hand-made objects, books and drawings in relationship to diverse environments and audiences.  She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

CHRISTOPHER MICHLIG received an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 2007. The Focus of Michlig’s practice is the manipulation of public formats of communication and language to explore communicative range, enhancing and privileging materiality and formal structures to expand notions of communication and legibility. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

TRICIA TREACY has been running her own letterpress design studio, Pointed Press Studio, creating custom book and print work for commercial clients, international artists, designers, and writers since 2000. She is a book artist, designer, printmaker, and integrates new forms of media to execute her ideas. Collaboration and experimentation are a large part of her creative studio practice. Tricia is also a Lecturer in Fine Arts at The University of Pennsylvania School of Design where she teaches letterpress, graphic design and book arts.

ASHLEY JOHN PIGFORD is an artist, designer, musician and educator working at the intersection of design process and art practice. His work manifests as electronic sculpture, interactive installation, performance, video, and letterpress printing. He received his MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design after a successful career as a proprietor of graphic design in Los Angeles, CA. He is Assistant Professor of Visual Communications in the Department of Art at the University of Delaware.

For a complete list of participating artists in the Vista Sans Wood Type Project, visit www.vswtp.org.

On view March 10 – April 8, 2012

Press Street’s Antenna Gallery
3161 Burgundy Street, New Orleans, 70117

Gallery Hours:
Saturdays and Sundays, from noon to 5:00pm.

For more information contact info@press-street.com or info@siftart.org.

Thanks to everyone who stopped in to make a book with us in our Drop-In Bookmaking workshop in February 26 at Press Street’s Antenna Gallery. Flag Books were definitely the order of the day and we were pleased with the different directions everyone took their book.

Participants were given the choice to make one of two non-traditional book structures. After making the book, we added content to our books using cut-up slivers of text from a variety of sources.

Here’s a great article by Tori Bush about SIFT and Kieu Lam’s Bound in Japan at Press Street’s Room 220.

Come see SIFT co-founders, Yuka Petz and Angela Driscoll, at the New Orleans Bookfair this Saturday along Frenchmen Street in the Marigny from 11am-6pm. We will be selling bookmarks, blank books, and postcards.