Print
Twitter
Facebook

 E-mail
Reddit
Digg

Tell us what you think!
Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.

The Maine Campus | The Maine Campus

The Maine Campus | The Maine Campus

The Maine Campus | The Maine Campus

Nick Alley slaps a glob of sticky, black ink on a plate. He and his partner, Greg Nanney, are about to give birth to a shirt.

Alley is beneath a canopy behind a white van. Behind him, hanging off the back of his truck, there’s a 600-pound wood press. A group of students huddle around; others look through a rack of shirts. The duo is part of the Drive By Press design collective; Alley calls himself a print missionary. Nanney pipes in: “We’re print carnies.”

For now, they’re showing what they do – and selling shirts in the process. Lined up around their workspace are a number of wood blocks, etched to become a garden of iconography. There’s a Luche Libre Wrestler from Mexico. There are stereos falling through space and bursting forth from vines. Over there, a microphone in flames.

“Everything looks better on fire,” Alley said.

The ink is transferred to a roller, which is applied to a wood cut. When the wood is nice and sticky, black with ink, it’s handed to Nanney. He presses the wood block to the front of a green cotton shirt, folds it up and pushes it through the press. Slowly, he pulls the wood from the shirt. The shirt and the wood cut, for a brief moment, become mirrors.

“The printing press hasn’t changed since the 1400s,” Nanney said. “It’s a long tradition, and this is the first version of it: Combine a press, some wood and some ink, and you can make perfect reproductions until the ink, or the wood, breaks down.”

“People have been saying that printmaking’s dead for 300 years,” Alley said. “But it still finds new ways of coming up.”

The pair are trained and rattle off technical terms to each other, but are open about their roots. They started making prints because they wanted to make images. They print those images on paper, but they also sell them on T-shirts, making every shirt by hand: the T-shirt as an art series.

“You see these kids with their iPods on, and you know they’re comfortable judging music,” Nanney said. By making shirts, he’s hoping to make art more accessible to audiences who aren’t as comfortable judging art as they would be with music.

The pair are the East Coast representatives of the Drive By Press; another pair covers the West Coast. They’ve been touring for three months now, though both have been touring for years. Greg has been doing tours for seven years. He estimates the collective has printed about 30,000 woodblock T’s. Alley left for one tour the day after his wedding.

They’ve collected screen prints, woodwork, reliefs and digital images from all over the U.S., and these were displayed in Lord Hall. The collection includes pieces from professional printmakers and graduate students combined by one factor: Virtually every piece was crafted by someone they’ve met on the road.

The pieces range from pop art to graffiti art, tattoo art to comic books. Spread out on tables across two rooms, it makes for a crazy visual pastiche: A pop-art Miss PacMan stands next to a loaded political image of African children sleeping soundly while a village burns in the distance. One picture depicts creepy Bolivian squirrel monkeys, another shows a young woman in front of a vending machine filled with doves.

And many of them – indeed the majority – are pretty crude.

Take, for example, the lovingly detailed flying turd or the highly sexualized renderings of auto parts. But the pair insist they’re just the most recent in a long line.

“The tradition of printmaking has a lot of crude, gross, hilarious stuff,” Alley said. He later added: “The first thing they did when they figured out that you could cut these images and print them onto paper wasn’t Bibles. It was naked people and playing cards.”

The work has its raunchy and hilarious side, but there’s a political side as well. For

some artists in their collection, even the act of collecting materials has a politically charged conceptual element. One artist rides a bike into gentrified neighborhoods to collect his materials from torn down buildings, infusing every piece with artifacts of a lost community.

You get the sense from Alley and Nanney that the process itself is political: Making work in multiples makes it more affordable and more democratic than making one piece and selling it for 25 times as much. Printmaking allows you to make 25 pieces and sell them off cheaper, making your work more affordable to people who otherwise couldn’t afford art.

“It’s a way of getting as much art to as many people as possible with as little pretense as possible,” Alley said.

• A tale of two bookstores: one solvent, one sinking (February 12, 2009)
• Trend Watch: V-necks shirts keep it classy and relaxed (February 11, 2010)
• Men’s soccer wins one of two weekend matches (October 22, 2001)
• Cross country teams finish one, two at UMass (September 22, 2003)
• One swipe, two prices? Not any more, says Student Government (March 27, 2008)

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009, 12:30 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.