 Ready? Can you all hear me OK? We're so excited to welcome you here this evening with Karen Coons and Ray Munez and John Hitchcock to have some really lovely conversation. But I do want to start out with some housekeeping. Is this anyone's first time seeing the exhibit tonight? Oh, great. Thank you for coming by. OK, that's always me. My son, but it's apparently the wrong direction here. You. Is Jenna a friend? Can she this one that's bigger up on two different sets of everybody's. Yeah, I'm here for now. And thank you for letting me know. So I am Melanie Finlayson. I'm the gallery manager here, but I had the lovely opportunity to curate this show because I also am a printmaker and have an MFA and Cessli gave me this amazing opportunity and trusted me with that job. And I was really honored. And this show, Passing for Change, celebrates various ways that printmakers provide an accessible voice for change. They also inspire action and explore relationships about community and land and environment. And I'm just really grateful for our whole team here, everybody that helps with all of these things and events. And so thank you, Jenna. Thank you, Katie, for monitoring tonight. And thank you to our team with all of our students work here. They're MSU students and they are fantastic and we couldn't do it without them. So thank you all. We are the Off-Campus Art Center for MSU Denver, and we act as a resource for students in the broader community through contemporary exhibitions. And we also have an immersive education program that Katie runs and a workforce development program. I'd like to start this evening also with a land acknowledgement. The Center for Visual Art acknowledges the privilege that we have to gather in this place once the territories and homelands of so many indigenous peoples, including the Rappahoe and China nations. We respect the many diverse indigenous peoples still connected to this land and value the knowledge systems they have developed in relationship to their land. We understand that offering a land acknowledgement neither absolves the settler colonial privilege nor diminishes colonial structure of violence at either the individual or institutional level. Land acknowledgments must be accompanied with ongoing commitments to displaced indigenous and immigrant communities. In order to learn more about the spatial relationships of indigenous communities to lands, we recommend visiting native-land.ca and exploring the interactive map. So just a few other things. CBA is connected to MSU Denver and supported by the university. But our exhibitions and additional programming are very much membership is where membership is organization. And so if you don't know this, many students are going to be here tonight, hopefully. I know that we're going to be responded to. You get it free membership if you're an MSU student. So please do. You have to activate that. Our students up front can help you with that. If not, anyone else who wants to join at any other member level helps funds these free programs that we do, including KU's programs as well. A couple other just things coming up with this show. Mo Print has so many amazing things happening, but we also have a few additional things, including an artist talk with Diane Fine and Mariela Plante on February 29th. They are going to be joining remotely, but they have sent little takeaways and we will be live streaming it here. So feel free to still come to the event or join online. We also have Culture Club on March 20th, which is CBA's art making happy hour. Please register for these events online and then Katie's art and action teams have an amazing fashion show that's going to be happening on March 15th. And we also have a talk with Greg Griffith and a demo happening and I didn't write the demo. March 21st is what I think it is, but it's all online. And now I have the honor of introducing these amazing folks and having a conversation. We just have images running around in the background of all of their works and them in the studio. So Katie's going to monitor. We're just going to have a conversation and feel free to raise your hand and ask questions as we go. Great. Yes. All right. Do we want to try to use that mic again? Yes. I'll try. How is this? Any better? No. Not any better. I'm going to go with that. I'll be right back. OK. Can you try? Thank you, Jenna. Ray, will you try this one here? Hello. Hello. There we go. We did test this one there, but nothing goes as planned. That's for real. All right. So I think we'll just start by passing these back. Yeah. So if you two want to share them, we can share. Yeah. All right. So thank you for being here today. Excited to talk to these amazing artists. And I hope everybody got a chance to look at them a little bit before you came here. As Melanie said, there will be slides running behind them so you can see more of their work. All right. So I would like to just start with some introductions. So if you would, I would love to hear, just introduce yourself a little bit. Give us a little bit of your background. And then I think maybe the printmaking process that you use because you all have a slightly different process even if you use some same materials. All right. Let's start with Karen. Hi, everybody. Can you hear me now? I guess it's great to be here and a beautiful exhibition. So I'm really honored to be part of this show. And my name is Karen Coons. And I'm from Lincoln, Nebraska. And I've been retired from teaching for 40 years, not all of it in Nebraska, but I taught printmaking all these years at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Four years I've been retired. And 10 years ago, I started Constellation Studios in Lincoln. So I've got a print studio, collaborative workshop site, artist residencies. And I invite people to come. Come see me in Lincoln. And what else was I going to say? And you're making me. Oh, well, as you can see them back here. We'll dive more deeply. And I print on etching presses. I have about five presses at my studio. One is a custom-made press, but it can print the really large works. And other ones, I use my brand press, and I've got a Turkish press. So I'm press rich. Yes. Hello. My name is Ray Munoz. I'm a Denver based artist, originally from Texas, but I've been here since 99. So I'm here to stay, I think. I do a lot of stuff in the art community. I run Alto Gallery, a part of Birdseed Collective. I do stuff with a mo-print as well. A big passion of mine is really promoting the work that people are doing now, especially on a local level. But as an artist, a lot of my work is photo-based because partly from promoting the art scene here, they've gotten taken a lot of pictures, and then that lets making art about those pictures. But I'm also very, very much interested in nature. And so a lot of the work I do is also based on that too. I'm a linocut relief artist. So I draw on a piece of linoleum, and I carve it out, the negative, and then I print it on either an etching press or by hand with a spoon. And it's kind of one of the more simpler ways of printing, but I just get endless joy and stress out of it. Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. I'm John Hitchcock. I'm a Wisconsin-based artist. I'm originally from Oklahoma. And a lot of the work that I do revolves around going back home in Oklahoma. A lot in the Fort Silleria, and I just worked about that relationship to that space. My mother's side of the family is Kyle Comanche, and my dad's German and Dutch from Michigan. So it's interesting to be living in the Midwest where my father's from and actually going home all the time, which I call Oklahoma, home, Oklahoma, but the place and how that functions for me is really important. And I am a filmmaker, and I did, yes. However, I do work within the context of video and sound and somewhat of performance and also a musician as well. And I teach at the University of Wisconsin of Madison for 23 years. So we have a programming program. So that's pretty good group of grads there and function and screen printing primarily and also relief is what I teach in installation art. So I do a lot of installation art. Yeah, who's next? Here we go. Okay. And I think we'll just kind of keep going down the line. So if you would now talk about the content of your work. So what's your work is about? We know a little bit about your process and we'll dive into that for sure. But give us some ideas of what your work is about. Oh, usually it takes me an hour to wind up. It's really about three to five minutes. I'm not going to take an hour. The elevator speech is nature-based abstraction. But I have always been interested in the big question of how do things happen? How do things come about? How are the mountains raised? How are the canyons and plants and kind of the unusual forms that are in nature? How do they look that way? So it really is kind of a generation question of how do things come about? And that really suits my weird abstraction because I'm making weird stuff too, which is what is in nature. Certainly landscape environment has always interested me and I'm from Nebraska and all of that open space and concepts about what happens on that land has really affected me. I saw it every day in my commuting life, driving across the landscape that the farmers are doing and needing to be done, but also it could be destructive and we all know the effects of that now. So it has had my work, have a subtext about environmental issues and I want to make something really beautiful and alluring, but it draws you in and then there's all the other connotations that come about that I don't know at the beginning. So I find it through the making and then so I have time to spend with the work while I'm making it and then all these ideas start cropping up and suddenly my work is suggesting Michelangelo Sistine Chapel to me. It's the same kind of tension of what happens when things come together by chance and by design, by accident, by evolution, by what we're doing to the environment. All of that makes these amazing weird forms. When you were talking about especially a relationship to photography and the work that you do in the community, it occurred to me that you're almost a documentary artist. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. So originally how it started was like I had a friend that was starting a kind of online art blog and needed people to write about shows and so that's how it started. It was really just going to different art shows and getting to know people, taking pictures of people interacting with the work, taking pictures of people creating the work as well, especially like mural artists. And it just, I had thousands of photos and it just seemed like kind of a waste to just put them on this little art blog. And I started making work that was based off of it, partly to document it, but also partly trying to figure out something more universal in the images so that it's not just the person that's pulling tape off of a mural, but what does that really represent? Like what does that say? Or like the piece that's in here brings like some people that are at a now closed DIY spot called Brain Osteropolis. That was just one night and I happened to be there and it actually shortly after the place closed for various reasons. And so it just occurred to me that that was important in a way to document, but also I saw something bigger going on there. And I didn't quite know what it was and so I kind of sat on that niche for a while until I decided to finally make a print out of it. And that's how it goes. Just some images kind of stick in my mind for some reason or other. Because they have a certain universal message that's more interesting to me than just documenting what happened. Yeah. That was a question. I'm sorry. I'm lost. The question right now is about the subject matter of your work. So the content and what it's about. All right. So the content, as I said earlier, a lot in Fort Still area. And so Fort Still is the military base and it's the largest field artillery training base in the United States. And so I grew up in that environment. That's the tank and the helicopters. And then you've got the relationship of the Wichita mounds, which is a wildlife refuge that is adjacent to the military base. So State Highway 49 separates my family's land, which is Comanche tribal land from Fort Still. And so they're both federal spaces. And so and also the wildlife refuge is well a federal space. And so that relationship of it on a political level, but also on its preserving and the idea of preserving space and the idea of the military and its relationship of what it represents and stands for within a cultural perspective. If you say that the highest percentage of people that serve in the military and indigenous people that serve as a huge percentage, then that place is also known for imprisonment, the drama of the Apache people, the dieting of the Cairo people and Juan Parker of the Comanche people were in prison and pushed to Fort Still. So that was originally developed as an Indian wars fort. So that relationship of where it started as a training post to a military complex to now the descendants of the people who were in prison were there and working in an environment also on land and so a lot of the things they think about and my work are that reverence to the idea of space and land, but also the idea of the military and the service and the idea of veterans and how veterans with indigenous culture are a very important component. And so I'm looking at that too and thinking about that. But then on the other end of it, there's a duality of that duality of the reality of how the military functions and within a war and such. It's kind of an attention. That's my elevator pitch. Okay, so the next round we'll be talking about your process, right? And of course, process and content come together, right? So how the processes you use also create the content that you talk about. Okay. It's hard to describe it exactly, but everybody understands what a wood block is, right? Just carving on the wood and printing off of the relief surface, which is basically what I do. But I think I have subverted some of the traditional ways that wood block has been done, especially color wood block. I don't necessarily use a separate block for every color. That would be laborious, a lot of carving. So I figured lots of work has actually to use probably mostly. These are done from two blocks. Both are reduced. So I print and carve and print and carve and print and carve until it arrives to the place that feels done. I don't have color sketches. I have bum nail sketches and drawings, but I'm not interested in knowing the colors ahead of time. So that is an evolutionary trust that I have in the process. And I think other things that I've subverted is instead of putting the first color down over everything, I use a lot of selective inking. I put ink and patches and use paper stencils so that it isolates the colors. So all of this actually, yeah, it's a technical thing, but it ends up being very much about the same thing I was talking about for content. It's an evolutionary process. And I don't know what's going to come out from initiating something that literally I didn't know anything about. That's why I'm doing the process in the first place to learn something about these images and how it happens. But it has a core in the oldest form of printmaking there is. The wood block, very accessible. I have big pieces of plywood in the studio. I'm not using fancy wood. This is usually just birch plywood that I can carve with my hand tools. And I'm using oil-based ink, but the ink emulates a lot of the qualities of the Japanese block printing method, which we call Oguhanga now, which just means block printing. But that has come to mean a certain kind of aesthetic and technique. And I've blended that process from my influence from Asian art and also from Western art, from Europe and the German expressionists. And it's truly a marriage that happens that has good emulation of those qualities from both sides. Tracy? Can you talk about how you applied the color to the block? Do you use a traditional roller method? Or how do you use that? I noticed some of your photos. I was like, ooh. I do use just regular rollers. Speedball are my favorite right now. Cheapy little speedball rollers that have all their problems, but gosh, I can replace them. I use a lot of those. Sometimes I may have eight or nine colors out at one time, and all those colors are in action. And once the ink is on the block, then I manipulate it further. So sometimes I'm blending things out. I'm using rags and wiping. And way back in the day, there were printmakers who said, you cannot do that. That's not allowed because it's like monoprinting. But actually, I can control it, and I kind of have my goal to be additioning because I'm doing all this work. For heaven's sake, I'm going to make more than one. So I really need that kind of flexibility for how the ink can further be manipulated, but it's not monoprinting. It has a consistency that I'm studying. What happens? What do I like? What choices? All those things come through proofing. Do you keep extensive notes while you're printing? No. The stage is right then. I'm going to do it right then. Clean up later. Can you speak to the softness? The what? Just the softness of the way you apply. I think people come in and as I've shown it to other people, they say it feels like watercolor or colored pencil or something like that. Well, most of my colors are very transparent. Sometimes they're 90% transparent base with a little bit of color. When I apply the ink, I really stretch it really thin, apply it very thin, and then I can blend it out. Sometimes I blend it out into the nothingness of the paper. So the white of the paper and what is not printed really interacts with the ink and what is printed. So that relationship is very interesting. But it's oil-based ink really stretched thin. Did you have a question? A question. As an artist, I've gotten more experience. I've actually used it into my art. I'm curious if you feel you've gotten a little bit more tight with your experience or if you've used it. I mean, that's a drive about which means. I think that certainly over the years, the color sensibility has changed and grown. I think I used much more heavy or primary colors, more intense, even though I think I'm doing the same things now. But the color sense is more sophisticated and a lot more subtleties. Has it totally? I've never worked representationally. This is the core of the way I've always worked. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. Sure. Sometimes it's hard to tell because you're nuts, right? Yeah. What was your question? If you've become more loose or more rigid as you. I've become much more adventurous because I am learning constantly. This is why I'm starting. Is the learning of what can happen and what to do. And I say I only use two blocks. But if I need a third, yes, I can go to a third block. It's only wood. If I need to do monoprint, yes, I could do that. But I'm not hand coloring. I'm not doctoring them up that way. I'm sorry. That's a dumb question. And maybe this is for everybody who does the printing. Do you then also consider your wood blocks standalone, like sculptural works after you've done carving them? Or do you really feel that the art is just the print? That's a dilemma. Everybody says they love the wood blocks. And I have them stacked up in the studio and they're beautiful. And I'm using them for influence. I don't think of them as the art, but I have made some as panels and some people even wanted to buy them. Well, that's good to get more things out the door. But actually the print is the thing. It has all the decision-making. All the stages are there. That's what I'm really after. And I'm not a sculptor. Thank you. So as a reminder, process and how it informs the content. You've spoken to it a little bit already, but. Yeah. So, I mean, my process is pretty simple. And I guess it really comes from my somewhat from my background, my artistic background, I guess. One of the things I wanted when I was a kid was a comic book artist. And so, you know, illustration is just kind of comes natural to me. That certain style, that sort of line work is what I love doing. And that particular kind of printmaking, it's very graphic. It's very wider black. And it's very good for having, like, having like a big, big impact in just, you know, one color. That being said, I do like to see how much subtlety I can get out of it. Because it is so easy to just make something that's just like a punch in the face. I don't always want it to be like that. Sometimes I want to see how soft I can make something. And there's different ways to do that, technically speaking. Just with the carving alone. And then, you know, more recently I've been learning more techniques, printmaking techniques, actually printmaking techniques. As opposed to just, you know, just inking at once and that's it. So, all of that comes into play. I really enjoy the process of carving. It's just, it feels good in my hand. I love that there's this sort of secret image as well from, like, in the chatter. And that you can control that. You can have these extra textures and it's kind of, it's interesting. So, like, looking at other people's blocks to seeing their decision making in the negative space that you don't see in the print. Because I can tell you a lot about the artist as well. You know, some people will just, you know, carve everything away in one direction. Some people will go in every which direction. Some people will get it down to follows the burlap, you know, like, and it's just kind of interesting like that. But there's something like I guess therapeutic about the slowness of it. Because it's a very labor intensive process. And, and you have to take your time with it and you have to be like very comfortable with your tools. And you got to let them be what they're do what they're made to do. And sometimes you want to just use one tool and just get through everything as much as you can with one tool. And then you end up, you know, making some wrong cuts or whatever or cutting yourself. Which happens sometimes. So, I feel like I'm always every print I do I feel like I'm learning something new about the process, even if it's just like a really simple one. And then just about design itself. I really as I think maybe from from the photographer's perspective, I think about like white balance a lot. And so in the in my designs I really try to think of it in those terms like okay I have this much black and this much white how do I balance it out. You know, how do I get that that mid tone in there as well. As well, like, and these aren't on display but I like playing around with like ghost printing for instance, as a technique. For different reasons like one I just think it's cool that you can just get more prints out of just, you know, one block one one meeting. But that that now that gives you this other. This is this other context that you can play with, and also just like just this simple technique. And so now you can talk about time passing or or death or whatever the case may be, and you can use that as part of the design as well. Other thing about print making of course is like just the play in it. Like, I don't really addition. I started off that way, because I thought that's what you're supposed to do and then I just had a really hard time with it I just got. It's like okay I want to make another print. But I mean, I, a lot of credit goes to people that can that can do that and do something like that so consistently again and again. But that being said, I really like to play around with my designs and reimagine them, use them in different ways, not be too precious about the print. So, in addition to like putting it on a wall and a frame, that's fine. That looks nice. But you can also cut it up, and you can also fold them, and you can turn it into books, and you can turn them into business cards if you want, which I did. It's just paper, and it's just ink. And that's the fun thing about it. That's partly why I really love print making. Yes. It's a really deep lax and I was wondering. Oh, for those ones, I think I think those are all soy based. Yeah, I think those are. Oh no, those ones. I, those are kind of older prints. I think the way I'm printing now is better and more even. But basically I just used a lot of ink. And I, and I hit it a couple of times. And I think some of those two I did by hand with a spoon, which getting that deep black with a spoon is like. So you kind of have to lift the paper up, re-ink it a little, put it back down. But I use a press a lot more now. So I don't really have that much of an issue and I can get a better print off that now. Thankfully. With your, oh yes, with your subject matter and using photographs that you've taken and sort of that are in your world. Is there, and it's such a long process. Do you spend any of that time sort of thinking about what's going on in the photo and how it relates to your world? Because I know you do a lot of work with the community as well. Are you, is that part of your process or is that gone by the time you're making prints? Oh yeah. I mean, the prints take so long to make. You know, you might start off thinking like, I just love this image and I know I have to do it. I don't know why, but I'm going to do it. And in the whole process, because it might take months to do a print, you learn more about it and you have the time to think about it. You have the time to really just get this image burned into your brain. And that can be really powerful. And then when you see it out in the world, that too can kind of, and you see like people interacting with it, people getting something out of it. That goes beyond like what I was intending to put out. That's a really special part. And what do you talk about this work, but I'm also really interested to hear more about your more involved installations as well and how that all feeds into your practice. Technical component. It's just great. It's simple. Okay, that's. I come from also the background of the dishing too, and I feel like that's for makers anonymous here, like, yes. I've done a lot of addition in the past, but probably in graduate school, there was a kind of a force to think about addition. And you're my professor language critic at the time was asking, can you make a really solid addition? Because I wanted to try to do installation. And actually, Karen Coons was one of our business artists in 1994. Remember, we had this conversation earlier and I remember and you gave me the idea of the thumbnail sketches that always stuck in my head. And then when it was about making sure that we were able to handle our additions, but on the other hand, each thing you want to experiment and do these things you're talking about, which were I was calling them installations and I was wanting to put objects on the ground on the blinkin and break away from the flat surface. And that's pretty much what Karen was saying about how it's a model print really is all it becomes a model print because there's the fixed matrix is kind of a component to that. But on the other end, there's all these objects that I'm printing on. So I was learning how to print on cylinders and learning how to print on fabric and, and things that have been in industry for years, but not in a kind of a arch program teaching. So it was experiments for me. And so I moved into working on materials and I really enjoyed that process because the materials themselves can speak in a language of space in place and so for me that a question earlier is what about the purpose of a print and what media to use is not important. What medium or media I'm using it's important that the idea is for present in the work. And so what does it take to get the image across is way more important than if I use silk screen or screen print or whatever you call it now. Or if I'm using, I don't use a lot of woodcut, but I've used it before or if I'm using painting or drawing. It's a lot of the installations to me are large drawings that you can draw. And that notion of drawing and how the drawing functions and using line and shape to convey a message which is a larger space. I think as a little kid, I was fortunate to be able to paint from my walls. And so that was the beginning of working in installation as a little kid. So using the wall space and thinking in terms of how that works and how I can bring imagery together was crucial. And so in this particular work, when I started this, I recycle a lot of works too. I had a lot of paper as well as objects like previously printed on. This was part of about 250 help like shapes that I created for an exhibition. It was at the Rocheberg Foundation in New York years ago 2014 or 13. And then I had these objects laying around and I wanted to reuse them and I started to pull them out and they were cut to a shape of a hide. And I started to, I already had screen printed X marks on them and then I started to kind of place the star shapes on them. The X marks are in reference to depth. They're in reference to keeping track. And they started originally when we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001. So those images were not, I began to start using those X-like shapes. But I was also looking at the involvement of how many people that died in war. So the X has a symbolic meaning in that. And then it also is referencing the 50 year period of how many buffalo had died. And so they didn't become a reference to what happened in COVID. How many deaths there to currently current war. So that's a reusable image that I've used over and over as a metaphor for keeping track. And the word thigh ball, which is white person in Comanche means keeping track. So I'm Mark thigh ball. I'm white too. So when my mother decides to nominate, that's a Comanche people. So I've been thinking about that relationship of list maker is what and keeping track and what list maker means in the word thigh ball. So that's another kind of message that's involved with it. And when I approach doing this, I don't, I see things too as how can I use a material to make it function. And I'm using paint markers or graffiti markers to draw the bead light shapes and all those little circles that are happening are beadwork. My grandmother was a beadwork artist. So as a little kid, I learned how to draw from her because she would have me look at the beadwork she was making. And she would ask me to design patterns, based on the patterns that she had was working on, then she'd have to go outside and I would go outside and draw flowers, particularly rose roses. And then I would come in, show the drawings to grandma got who and she would look at them and then she say, I want you to make something and use your imagination. So I would draw something and she'd look at them and she'd say, What about this? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about it? I'm like, this is a learning critique. My grandmother gave me a critique. So I'm getting theory, kind of color theory. She started talking about night colors and day colors and the relationship of the design pattern that I was making or observational drawing and then imagination and this idea of how these work. And so I was learning drawing, like theory innocence. So I think about that when I'm working on the work I'm working on. Okay. Some of that color theory, is that reflected in here? Yeah, I'm thinking of day and night colors still. So like I said, the little dots, she would sometimes walk into the room and she would set her beads down and I would actually not, she would have her medicine bottles. Those little medicine bottles and they're full of beads and I'd knock them down and she would say something to me and I'd knock her beads all over the table. And I remember one time she just came in and threw the beads and scattered the beads on the table and I got stuck in my head and that's how I see these dots or her beads on the table. But I also think about them as stars and the celestial and how that kind of functions too. So I'm looking at them as that as well. And so that pattern maybe and that looseness of that and there was no, she was talking about the hidden bead too. Like in bead work that there's nothing that's really ever complete and perfect but there was always a bead you leave out. And that message of that leaving out components of the place where something can move in and out. It's not a spirit movement and out of or thought or a way of conversation. So you have room for growth so that there's not only one point of view that is both point of views. So that was another learning that she said and I've been stuck in my head. Melanie, remind me, are we going to 630 or 7? 630. 630. So we're almost there. All right. I think let's just go through and if you could talk to us sort of about like what's on your horizon, what's next. What's your what you're thinking about in the future. You know, you might have seen one slide go through goodbye here of a big stack of prints. I'm working on a commission, an additional 250, which is something I am thinking about. Do I need to do it? I kind of wanted to. I'm working with the Cleveland Museum of Art Print Club. And they're one of the longest print clubs in the country that have worked with artists way back for 75 years or so. So lots of big names are in there and a lot of unknowns also. And it's a nice commission to work on this year. I don't know what else I'm going to do other than just talking with Brian Curling about an exhibition plan that we want to cook up about borders. And so I like to curate shows once in a while. I do it at the studio also. But this one could be at the studio and also travel. So it's in the in the back of my mind that's working on. Karen, I'm just curious how if you think pretty much about your book work in the same way that you describe thinking about your books. I think that the book works. Harry, I've always had a practice of doing artists books along with my prints ever since graduate school, so it's been a long time of long interest. And I think they address very much the same things as the prints, but they say it in a longer voice because there are more images. They have a different format. They have tactility and the physicality of the book, so they really, again, a way to kind of violate the print. I get to touch those prints. They're meant to be touched and you're handling the paper and seeing what the ink is like. So it augments what I do with the prints. And often I'm doing woodcuts in those as well, sometimes etching. And often I find a text that goes along with the book. So then here's somebody else's voice that's saying something so wonderful that's more than what I could say. I try to say that visually, but maybe just the right text to go with the artist books is really an expansion of what I'm doing. I think. Yeah, coming up quite a bit coming up. So month of printmaking, Denver's month of printmaking is, it's in effect, but it really marches like the big month. There's all kinds of things happening. I'm very lucky to be involved with that organization. Helping out with different things, but the big one is print jam. So that's something that I encourage everybody here to come to. It's going to be at the Arvada Center March 16. And it will be demoing a bunch of different kinds of printmaking in a really beautiful show setting. So I'm really excited about that. I'm co-organizing that with Brady Smith and Aaron Jones. And so please come out and support that. Other than that, though, there's, you know, different shows. I'm working on a solo show that's going to be at Leon Gallery opening April 6. So I'm working on two crazy pieces, which I think I previewed a couple images in there. So I hope I can finish those. I'll get back to that when I finish here. And yeah, there's just all kinds of cool things happening in Denver. And I'm really grateful to be a part of it. I'm coming. Hamilton prototype. I'm going to Hamilton with type of two rivers to do a series of works on horses. I could use them going to their archives and looking at the images of horses. And I'm using that with. It's the commencement work for horse and some kind of learning about language too. At the same time, also looking at these images that are there. And in addition to that, I've done a whole series on horse mass right now that's traveling. And it's going to be at the Tweed Museum coming up in Duluth. And it's currently at the Nalser Museum in Louisiana. And what else you guys show that was one of the installations that was up. That had very similar entry is at the National Gallery in Washington DC. And it's traveling to connect the New Britain Museum. So I'm getting ready to go there. I think next month to install that and get that ready. And so installing that is also a process of all those are kind of prints. So those were already previously printed. And they're mainly square prints. They're cut to shape and they're going to be installed directly on the wall. Oh, music. So I'm a cinema musician at the video of this piece, this artwork. There is actually two videos playing. One of them is a story. So we get a chance and that's playing and come back to the gallery and that's up. There's a story I'm telling. And it's a story like grandmother told me. And there's other stories she's told me. And there's also situations that I've occurred unique situations that I've with my cousins. And so I told those stories recorded them. And in our band I plan and we created a music sort of a whole piece around each story. So we're releasing an album coming probably the end of this probably may is the plan. Like it's songs. It's a company's the actual body of work that's out there already. But this music is going to be released soon too. And so I'll have my website's hybrid press and they're open links on it too. But there's music out there already. Another album and we did that has a still lap still guitar. Regular guitar. There's other things, but that's enough. It does look like we have time for sorry, this delay on here. It doesn't look like we have time for a couple of more questions. Are there any questions that haven't been asked yet? Wow. So two of you have said that you're specifically teachers and for a moment you said that you do demos. Do you like to teach the type of programming that you do? Or do you have a preference to teach you something else that you don't do every day for your own art? Well, I've been a generalist printmaker as the teacher all these years and I taught everything. Primarily, I like teaching etching, woodcut and I'm okay with lithography. Screen print. Not so great either, but I've done it all and you kind of have to know these things and sometimes just teaching those media make me want to do it too. So I have done etching continually all these years, not on the scale of the wood blocks, but that's been an interesting thing to keep developing as well. But, you know, that's the way you learn more if you're teaching. The students can be all these experimenters and make all the problems. It's really interesting to keep pushing those through having all these models with the students. So, how can I answer this? I teach screen printing and relief advanced class and I work with graduate students and I do interdisciplinary critiques and conversations. Teaching has changed way a whole lot over the years. That's like a panel of crazy itself. And the process I primarily love to do is screen printing and the class I love teaching a lot is intro to relief. That's the magic that happens and the kind of colors. I always see what you carry through the colors. I wish I could do that because I might get all money and this doesn't happen right and throw the stencils. It's like, let's just write that my students do it and I'm always surprised. Wow, like you did it. That's like, wow, I mean, I can't do that. It's amazing. And so that expectation of what you show them and what happens and the magic they create is always empowering. I love that feeling every time that someone surprises me with something I didn't expect. I really appreciate the dimensional work too. And so when you were talking about blocks, I encourage students to use those in their work, make it about the object, make it about your thing. Whatever the intent of your meeting gets more important than worrying about only the process. And I think that's a methodology that we're in a different generational space that we don't have to. We're making lives and we'll continue to live. But the reality of some of the techniques, there needs to be a survival component in those two. Having that ability to bring those together and think in an artistic way, but also know that the technique has to be there to make things work right. So it's important, but I love teaching. I've been doing it for 23 years in Madison and three years before that in Minnesota. So it's, like I said, I've been in grad school my whole life. There are 53 grads, so it's a lot of stuff. Yeah. This is actually a question that fits on that for Ray. So I know that you've worked a lot with curating exhibits. It's the same kind of thing, how much in that all of your curating experience in the form of studio work advice. Hmm. It's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I guess it all kind of gets in there. And I guess exposed to so many different artists and so many different kinds of art and putting shows together, like it all kind of blurs together. Honestly, it just because I've been doing it for like 10 years now. So, but it definitely makes its way into the work, I think, in some ways. How exactly, I guess it depends on each piece. But there is that. I'm going to put it. It's a different piece. It's a different piece of curating, I guess. Okay, here's the thing. Curating is more about taking other people's work and really, really letting it shine, doing everything you can to make sure that their work shines. And whatever that means, whether it's like the way you hang the show, the weather, how you have pieces talk to each other, the different context you bring out of them. And so in some ways curating, I feel is like a selfless act because it's so much work. And so many curators I know are very talented artists, and it's like they step back so that they can allow other people to really shine. And when I am in artist mode, it's like I have to remind myself like, oh wait, now it's my time to step forward. Now it's my time. Like I can't just shrink back and just let everybody else. Like now I have to be in touch with what I'm about, what's important to me, and describing what I'm feeling. But definitely having all those people in my head, all those different experiences, it definitely does influence me. It's interesting how that is like teaching, you know, letting other people shine and then stepping back and doing your own. One last question. Question is how do you think AI would affect this now when it's going to be talking to people? Okay, so I'll repeat that. So the question is about AI in relation to, you know, something that's so handmade, right? And how it relates. And that's a great question to ask after the other time. So very quickly. I'm so new, I don't quite know what the ramifications will be. I've always prided myself on trying to stay ahead of all my imitators and all the other people out there, so I have to get weirder and weirder. I don't have AI to take my words. Don't ask them to look for me. And I just think the big fear I always have is that the satisfaction everybody will have with the lesser than choices, the digitalized choices, the nonhuman choices will replace reality. And pretty soon we don't need elephants anymore. They're all on the video somewhere. So it could be the same thing with this. You know, we don't need artists. We don't need the creative thinkers because a machine can do it. Although they do a generic version and hopefully people will come to where they need what we're made for, what our hands are for, the physicality of relating with real things. Yeah, I totally agree. The thing is like the stuff that AI is producing, you're seeing it on generally like your phone or your computer monitor. And that's just not how you see this work, you know, none of that is ever going to produce the same effect as coming over here and looking at the quality of John's pieces. You know, or looking at how the color really looks in Karen's pieces. You can replicate that, like that's just something that's, and because printmaking is not a perfect process, even if you're really, really good at additioning, they're all a little different. And that's like kind of the really beautiful thing about printmaking too is that, you know, that they are still unique. Still unique. So I grew up with that a lot actually this morning I was working on that. Because my students and students, they're like, every time I walk into my advanced print class, everyone has a pipeline. And they're like using their little pencil to draw it. Procreate. Procreate. Procreate replaced Photoshop. But you need Photoshop to make the transparency. So it didn't. So like, okay, this doesn't make sense. So we make all our little drawings on Procreate. With their hand drawing, which I love it. I'm like, that's awesome. Yeah, draw more. And then they throw a photo in and they draw around. They do it. We produce the images. They put up in a screen and then they print them with ink and it totally transports them into something else. So I'm actually experimenting with that personally right now. However, I feel, I have a colleague who's also in this exhibition and we are their professor, aren't there? Emily is all about hand painting and hand drawing. So she has them before they come to be. And they have skills with doing washes and hand drawing on my lards. And then professor up to a lot of. Faisal. He also uses bit mapping and Photoshop and all those techniques too. So when I give you advanced students, they're kind of two spaces. And it's a unique place because we're still using traditional methods to advance those ideas. Then I go to a graduate critique or a graduate thesis defense. And they use chat GPT to write their hardest statement and make a video about it. They did it on purpose to talk about the nature of what technology is doing. And they put glitches in it purposefully to show that they didn't chat to you to do this or did I do this or what. And so we're at this unique stage of this conversation. At least artists are really considering young contemporary artists are thinking about what it does and how does that function and where are we going with it. And I feel I agree too with the hands involvement is crucial for us as survivalists makers because we're seen at virtual galleries is that where we're going and what does that mean. And I think that we still have this need for unity. We still have this need to have this conversation. We still have this need to read the same air. Even though when there was not readable, we still wanted to be in the same room with each other. And I think that's the place as existence as people we strive for that. And I think that's where we for us to survive. We have to retain that. And I think hands on use is crucial. All right. Thank you so much. So we'll be around for a little bit if you have more questions. But thank you.