Alex Lukas
Centralia, Pennsylvania, 2018, Acrylic and screen print on paper, 19 x 13 inches.
“... I think a lot about “local color.” This is really an imprecise and fallible term, but I think of it in relation to how regionalized aesthetics and vernaculars develop from and are reflected through color.”
Alex Lukas is an artist living and working in Santa Barbara, California (USA). Their approach to color is often practical, and their approach to printmaking focuses on the distribution of printed ‘zines and ephemera, alongside the incorporation of printmaking techniques as tools for drawing and painting. Their elaborate publishing projects and research-based projects are created with Risography, serigraphy, and offset lithographic printmaking techniques incorporated into multifaceted, cross-disciplinary visual projects. Currently Alex is working on an ongoing fanzine project documenting and transcribing hyper-local occurrences of public name writing.
What can printmaking ink achieve regarding color in your work that no other material can?
Printed color is color that spreads - it’s not fixed like paint on a wall. Instead, printmaking ink is handled, traded, sent, received and exchanged. In a cacophony of CMYK and black ink-on-white paper, spot colors pop, and any unusual color combinations stick out. Maybe it’s similar to spray paint on New York City subway trains in the 1970s and 80s - a polyamorous marriage of color and text and imagery that circulates hand-to-hand and disrupts daily understandings of how information is transmitted. Very few materials can achieve that, but printmaking ink is one.
A 61 (Destroyed), 2018, Single-channel video projection.
“Printed color is color that spreads ... printmaking ink is handled, traded, sent, received and exchanged.”
Written Names Fanzine #10: Names Written in Bicentennial SEPTA Trolleys, Windber, Pennsylvania.
Written Names Fanzine #9: Names Written in Tar, Carpinteria, California, 2021.
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
I enjoy constraints. Approaching printmaking and color as a ‘zine maker, I’m always interested in making the most of what is available, what is affordable, and what will allow me to make in multiple while keeping my prints and publications accessible. Because I was working primarily with photocopiers, introducing color was limited to what non-white stock I could find in letter, legal, or tabloid sizes. I’d bring reams of my own paper to Kinkos and surreptitiously feed it through the bypass tray.
After my undergrad, I built a small exposure unit and began screen printing anything that wasn’t reproducible in black toner. I attended RISD in the early 2000s and was heavily influenced by the loose registration and printing with transparent inks that people like Brian Chippendale were using for show posters and mini-comics. That “Providence aesthetic” was so sophisticated at making a lot from a little. I copied a lot of those strategies for reusing screens, layering transparent colors, and trying to turn limitations into possibilities.
I worked that way for years, producing publications that were primarily photocopied with screen-printed components. Occasionally, I was able to introduce single-color offset pages, full-color spreads, and even diazotypes to create publications that tried to push at the constraints of what a “‘zine” could be.
The Risograph has offered so many possibilities for this practice. While the color choices are limited (a new constraint), Risography facilitates a speed of production that aligns with the urgent ethos of underground- and self-publishing. I still have a hard time containing my excitement at printing an entire two-color publication in a day. And because the Riso inks look so different when layered and printed on colored paper stock, the results can be expansive even when working with even a small selection of drums.
Since 2016, I’ve been producing Written Names Fanzine, an ongoing publication series documenting hyper-localized occurrences of unsanctioned public name writing. Through research, transcription, and design, Written Names examines shared experiences of place, history, and localized assertions of identity. Each issue focuses on a place of gathering, ranging in scale from a single stand of bamboo to a mile-long stretch of highway. The format of each issue is largely standardized: two Risograph inks on a color paper stock, sixteen pages plus cover, 9.5” tall by 6.5” wide, in editions of 100 or so. These constraints were determined by the size of a ream of paper and the two-color duplicator I had access to. They are not firm - there is usually a third color on the cover, and I’ve recently upped the page count - but it is generally helpful for me to set parameters to work within, mirroring the limitations I encountered when first making ‘zines.
“I became interested in this cycle of narrative - a disaster happens, people come to see, the visual signifiers are demolished to stop people from visiting, visitors construct a new type of disaster with new visual signifiers, and more people come to see, etc. I was especially focused on the insertion of color onto the landscape and how it furthered this cycle of visitation and spectacle.”
Written Names Fanzine #8: Names Written in Soot on the Ceiling of Gothic Avenue, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, 2019.
Written Names Fanzine #1: Names Written in Nails Embedded in Railroad Ties, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2016.
Written Names Fanzine #7: Names Carved into Aspen Trees by Sheepherders, Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho, 2019.
PA 61 (Destroyed) Marginalia, 2018 (installation view), Found painted sticks on steel supports, looping video (11:00), FM Transmitter broadcasting in the gallery, 10 FM radios with headphones.
Marginalia 4, 2018, Roadside growth from PA 61 (Destroyed), found to be painted with Krylon Gloss True Blue, American Accents Seaside and Krylon Mambo Pink.
Marginalia 5, 2018 Roadside growth from PA 61 (Destroyed), found to be painted with Krylon Fierce Purple, Rustoleum Night Tide, Painter’s Touch Spa Blue, Valspar Tropical Oasis, Painter’s Touch Gloss Deep Blue, Krylon Gloss Black, Rustoleum Aluminum and Krylon Watermelon.
Marginalia 5, 2018 Roadside growth from PA 61 (Destroyed), found to be painted with Krylon Fierce Purple, Rustoleum Night Tide, Painter’s Touch Spa Blue, Valspar Tropical Oasis, Painter’s Touch Gloss Deep Blue, Krylon Gloss Black, Rustoleum Aluminum and Krylon Watermelon.
What cultural aspects of color are built into your work?
Across my print and non-print-based work, I think a lot about “local color.” This is really an imprecise and fallible term, but I think of it in relation to how regionalized aesthetics and vernaculars develop from and are reflected through color. One example is the dominance of black and gold (or frequently yellow) in Pittsburgh. Obviously, this pairing is a reflection of the Pirates and Steelers team colors. Still, it’s grown to become this color scheme for the region, and by extension, for the Pittsburgh diaspora that continues to embrace this color duo as part of broadcasting identity. Pittsburgh lost almost half of its population when the steel industry collapsed, but that cultural connection to place and color perseveres by extension. Several years ago, I was driving through suburban Honolulu and saw an entire home painted black and gold and adorned with Steelers paraphernalia. It was an interesting displacement of a palette I associated with a post-industrial, rust-belt landscape, situated there amongst palm trees.
Another example comes from Boston, where I grew up. There, the subway lines are designated by color, and this codification reflects a type of cultural geography. The Green Line runs along Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace, and the Red Line originally terminated at Harvard University, where the school color is crimson. The Blue Line was the first subway in North America to go underneath a body of water. The rationale for the Orange Line’s name is disputed - it was either to aesthetically balance the other lines or a reference to an earlier name for Washington Street. As a kid, this color coding shaped my understanding of the city and how to move through it.
“Local color” isn’t always as clearly institutionalized or widely legible, though, and I’m especially interested in places where it needs to be decoded with more care or intention. In 2018, I made some work about Centralia, Pennsylvania, an eastern ghost town about three hours west of Philadelphia. After a trash fire ignited an underground vein of coal in 1962, the town was slowly abandoned. It became a mecca for ruin-porn tourists who wanted to wander in the vacant structures and photograph steam emanating from cracks in the ground. It was an inspiration for the film adaptation of the Silent Hill video game and became one of those Atlas Obscura, Weird New Jersey-type places where complex social, economic, and environmental issues get mixed in with roadside Americana in uncomfortable ways.
But by the time I first visited in 2017, all of the buildings had been demolished, and the fire had moved far enough underground that the earth no longer “smoked.” The legend had grown so popular that people still flocked to the town. One of the few remaining “sights” was a mile-long stretch of abandoned highway where the surface had buckled from the underground fire. Unofficially christened “Graffiti Highway,” crudely written names, quippy messages, and juvenile vulgarities covered the blacktop with a rainbow of language. It was almost like a giant guestbook or trail ledger.
In places, the color expanded past the road and onto the abutting bushes, which I considered marginalia to the text of the highway. I watched hundreds of Youtube videos filmed on Graffiti Highway for this work. In some, the vlog narrators positioned these spray-painted trees as fantasy objects, imagining them as sprouting and blossoming in new and mutated ways because of the underground conflagration.
I became interested in this cycle of narrative - a disaster happens, people come to see, the visual signifiers are demolished to stop people from visiting, visitors construct a new type of disaster with new visual signifiers, and more people come to see, etc. I was especially focused on the insertion of color onto the landscape and how it furthered this cycle of visitation and spectacle. The color was bright and garish but different from the bright and garish street art murals you see in gentrifying neighborhoods. The colors present on the road in Centralia were all Rustoleum, Valspar, and Krylon, spray paint brands available at nearby Walmart and Lowes stores. The more expensive craft brands have a decidedly different range of hues, a distinct finish and spray pattern, and are only available at art supply stores like Dick Blick. They were absent in Centralia.
My work presented a video of collected footage from Graffiti Highway alongside samples of the roadside growth in the gallery. I meticulously matched each color of paint on each sample with the spray paint used to paint it and listed these colors on the materials list. It was a gesture intended to dispel the fantasy of Centralia while simultaneously grounding the tools of alteration in a local landscape.
“Local color” is far from a perfect concept, but I keep circling around it.