Letterpress
Wood Type
Metal Type
Crane’s Lettra
Mohawk Chromolux
Wood Type
Metal Type
Crane’s Lettra
Mohawk Chromolux
Black Cat is a series of prints produced responding to discussions during the Sequences, Iterations, and Permutations seminars at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.
In 2022, my work started to center increasingly on my writing. I wrote the paragraph set in metal type in response to meditations on the word “foreign.” When I was in my twenties, this was a word I often used to describe myself. At the time, after encountering soft bias, I claimed the word as a badge of honor.
More than a decade later, and after becoming an American citizen, I no longer used it. Recently, an old friend called me. When we chatted, they playfully disagreed with me by saying, “Yes, Vida, but you are foreign.” Somehow, the word felt sharp, and I started thinking about what we mean when we call each other and ourselves “foreign.”
The black ink on white paper is dense and saturated unevenly, creating a distorted landscape of uneven metal letterforms indented into Crane’s Lettra paper. They are subsequently inked less and less and presented in a fading sequence. The paragraph printed on Mohawk Chromolux black paper is blind printed. Without any ink, the metal type bites into the slick, shiny surface of the paper.
2022
In 2022, my work started to center increasingly on my writing. I wrote the paragraph set in metal type in response to meditations on the word “foreign.” When I was in my twenties, this was a word I often used to describe myself. At the time, after encountering soft bias, I claimed the word as a badge of honor.
More than a decade later, and after becoming an American citizen, I no longer used it. Recently, an old friend called me. When we chatted, they playfully disagreed with me by saying, “Yes, Vida, but you are foreign.” Somehow, the word felt sharp, and I started thinking about what we mean when we call each other and ourselves “foreign.”
The black ink on white paper is dense and saturated unevenly, creating a distorted landscape of uneven metal letterforms indented into Crane’s Lettra paper. They are subsequently inked less and less and presented in a fading sequence. The paragraph printed on Mohawk Chromolux black paper is blind printed. Without any ink, the metal type bites into the slick, shiny surface of the paper.
2022