Picking up where the (now on-hiatus) 20x200 left off, Mammoth and Company sells affordable art online. Founded by CEO and Photographer Troy Moth, the store stocks an inventory of hundreds of prints, usually between three and six works per artist, and titles from a newly launched children's publishing arm Little Mammoth. If a print catches your eye and you order it, it'll ship from the idyllic barn pictured at the bottom of the post, Mammoth and Company's headquarters somewhere in a field in Victoria, British Columbia.
For his letterpress study of masks, Jonny Wan first had the daunting task of structuring centuries of mask history into a four print series. His initial research determined that no matter what period he was looking into, every mask he had found served one of four purposes: ritual, protection, performance, or fashion. Wan chose a mask from each category used in different periods, and printed the series on four different paper stocks using metallic inks. [via FPO]
For about 12 years, starting in 1903, the Tour De France route remained unchanged. It formed a nearly perfect outline of France, save for a small indentation in the north west corner. The following 80 or so races featured more dramatic variations, including portions of the route which ranged outside of France altogether. This year's race started in Corsica.
Designer Sam Potts dug through race map archives to design a poster depicting all 100 routes, with a list of the top three riders of each year. While cycling fans might be attracted to the simplicity of just the race's outline in "Races" version, geography buffs will want to opt for the second "Cities" version of the print, which includes the name of every city the tour passes through.
Congratulations Chris Froome, the poster for the 2013 race is avilable for purchase. 
The new poster campaign by Oliver Uberti for 826Michigan, McSweeney's nonprofit tutoring center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, taps into similar rhetoric and imagery to what we've seen from the PSA posters from subway systems in Japan, and staycation posters from wartime England. This time, instead of warning citizens about drinking too much, and not taking vacations, the posters tout the kid-friendly theme of robot revolution and the center's alias as Liberty Street Robot Supply and Repair.
If you find yourself at the Independent Label Market in London tomorrow morning, you might want to make XL Recordings's stall your first stop. This week the label screen printed 50 copies each of some of its bigger releases for sale at tomorrow's event, including new LPs from Vampire Weekend and Atoms for Peace. In addition to the LPs, they'll also have a CD of King Krule's brand new "Easy Easy" single, and a 7" from The xx.
Here's the list of special editions:
Atoms For Peace - Amok LP
Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City LP
Sigur Rós - Kveikur LP
The xx - Together 7"
King Krule - Easy Easy CD Single
Check out a GIF of all the covers:
At the end of May, No Age surprised members of the press with an advance copy of its new album, An Object, in a box designed, printed, and manufactured by the band and their collaborator Brian Roettinger.
The physical object has a conceptual link to the writing and recording of the album, as the band approached the new record with a "sound as material" physicality during the mixing process, and shaped sounds with contact microphones and prepared speakers while recording.
The silkscreen-printed promo boxes and album packaging are in line with editorial philosophies of small presses like Rollo Press, where the artist is inextricably linked to the commercial production of the work. By acting as the physical manufacturer of the album, the band hopes "the roles [of manufacturer, artist, musician] trip on themselves, and individual parts lose their distinct meanings, demanding to be considered as a whole."
UPDATE: We just received some additional production details from Sub Pop. The band designed and manufactured a special edition of 10,000 copies of the album. Half of those are vinyl, and half are CD, but both will read "Manufactured by No Age" in the bottom left corner. After those initial 10,000 copies are gone, Sub Pop will produce a second, non-silkscreen printed version of the album with a reversed color scheme that won't have the same manufacturing message. The boxes seen in the first photo below were also printed by the band to deliver the covers to the manufacturing plant.
Check out photos of the production below, read Ian Cohen's recent interview with the band, and keep an eye out to pre-order a copy of the record from Sub Pop.
Images courtesy of Dexterity Press
Rodan was only active a few years, but the Louisville, KY-based band made quite an impression on the underground scene of the early '90s with powerful but precise compositions which played with extreme dynamics and time signatures. The band's music lurched like a goliath insect—and appropriately its album art for debut Rusty featured a butterfly in flight.
While guitarist/vocalist Jeff Mueller continued in bands such as June of 44 and Shipping News, he eventually focused on art and design, setting up his own printing press studio in Chicago—before moving to New Haven, CT—with his wife Kerri. Rodan's Jason Noble passed away in 2012, so tragically he won't see the release rarities album Fifteen Quiet Years, due out tomorrow, June 11, on Touch and Go/Quarterstick Records. Its cover features a cicada, which seems particularly apt for a band's work unearthed after so many years.
Nothing Major caught up with Mueller to find out more about his bug obsession, printing biz, and Fifteen Quiet Years.
I remember you were really into insects during the Rodan years—I mean visually. I think perhaps you had some bug art in your pace in the Rocket House, my memory can't be trusted.
That's true —there were also crayfish, bird and/or rat skeletons, cicadas, a small frog, one rhinoceros beetle, monarch butterflies, and an egyptian luna moth. All found in the "no longer alive" category, even the skeletons. After their capture, I would preserve them in glass collages using water-born polyurethane to hold the subject in between layers of cut glass. There would often be other small objects like a mono-ear piece or small rubber pig or paper mai-tai umbrella also included in the composition —these items, I think, would be included to give the deceased a source of entertainment, hopefully garnering a post-humous chortle.
What kind of things usually find their way into your printing over the years?
Lots of stuff: appropriated historic anatomical engravings, primates eating delicious iced cream cones, greyhound skeleton, lanterns, ornithological imagery (found, as well as Jeff-generated illustrations), wood, upside-down/foot-up pied metal type, old and new song lyrics, various patterns built using Adobe Illustrator, etc.
What's Dexterity Press and how long have you been doing it? Is is your main gig?
What kind of printing equipment are you using? Where is your studio?
Dexterity Press is a letterpress printing studio my wife Kerri and I opened 13 years ago. It's my main, 9-5 work these days - though that's only been the case since we moved east three years ago. Our first ten years in Chicago were always supplemented by other jobs—painting Chicago north-side houses with Dan Grzeca was key to keeping us alive while things were VERY slow in the early days at our shop. We are now located in New Haven, CT—in the old A.C. Gilbert building complex, where Erector Set toys used to be manufactured. We print on a Vandercook Universal 1 and a Chandler and Price 10 x 15 platen press.
You recently printed the Thrill Jockey 20th Anniversary posters. What else have you been working lately that's music related?
We printed an Allen Ginsberg/Arthur Russell 10" a year or so ago now for Presspop Gallery, Tokyo. We printed a compilation 12" called "Eight Trails, One Path" for Three Lobed Recordings last year—that was fun because Casey Burns did the art, and many great musicians were involved. We printed an insane looking Mick Barr 12" for the energetic New Haven label Safety Meeting Records. We printed matchbook-style CD jackets for Christian Frederickson. We've been reprinting and retro-fitting Rachel's and June of 44 CD/LP jackets for Touch and Go/Quarterstick records, trying to figure out special-packaging manufacturing methods that can be done entirely in-house for less cost. We printed LP/CD jackets for a great Louisville band called Coliseum. Most recently, the Rodan record took over our studio for a couple weeks.
What was your involvement in the design of the new Rodan rarities album Fifteen Quiet Years?
Jason and I talked about grabbing graphic bits and pieces from our previous releases and collaging them into the new record design; the nuts and bolts of the art was already done, it just needed to be messed with and changed-up some. I did the new layout and created the cicada on the cover. The Quarterstick staff (Corey Rusk, April Sims, Adam Reach, and David Babbitt) helped proof-read and assisted immensely with pre-press. (Rodan members) Tara (Jane O' Neil) and Kevin (Coultas) kicked in with motivational speak and congenial/positive attitudes, sweet love.
Contact Dexterity Press, or browse the Dexterity Press Etsy shop.
Kate Gibb is known in some circles for her stellar work on Chemical Brothers record sleeves. She's a self-taught printmaker that still works in silkscreen out of her Paddington studio. She recently relaunched her website with an expanded online shop offering limited-edition, signed prints at a reasonable price.
You can also nab a Kate Gibb Collage T-shirt in the Nothing Major online shop.
Visit the new Kate Gibb site online.
Chicago design and print studio Sonnenzimmer are usually busy hand-making equisitely modern posters, books, and music packaging. For their latest exhibition, opening Friday, April 12 at Public Works, the design and printmaking duo feeds its fine art jones with an investigation of the textures of traditional textiles. The textiles are the result of a collab with recipients of the 2012 Chicago Architectural Prize Club Club. The new works merge hand-woven and screen-printed fabric in a series of quilts, which Sonnenzimmer prints on, naturally. Sonnenzimmer has a book in the works to document the venture.
Opening for "Image Structure" takes place Friday, April 12, 2013, 7pm-10pm at Public Works
R.S.V.P. for the opening on Facebook
The unwanted presence of garbage is a universal concern. That presence can mean anything from empty candy wrappers and packs of cigarettes tossed on the sidewalk, to massive landfill mountains made of trash. Artists Carly Fischer and Yau Lu have approached the concept of an unending stream of rubbish in two very different ways.
Fischer explores the idea in a way that might seem counterintuitive to most works about garbage: she actually recreates common litter like beer cans, old TVs, and neglected construction materials using only bright papers. She pays special attention to leave the original logos intact, almost as a way of addressing her sculptures. The work is also shown in charged postures: either in sealed glass cases, or scattered on the floors of galleries.
An early series by photographer Yao Lu recreated historical images from the Song dynasty by altering photos of trash. The new context managed to connect the landfill scenes with the industrialization of his home country of China, and his new work continues in a similar political direction. Not unlike Fischer's hyperrealistic sculptures, Lu's landscapes are not what they first appear. He swaps idyllic mist for inevitable smog, and the mountains that were often the subject of early Chinese art, with the massive piles of garbage he's used to seeing in landfills.