Asa Mease
Implements for the Assessment & Removal of Post-Burn Conifers (detail).
“I love the scaffolding of multiplicity that printmaking provides, as it changes how precious and discrete any motion can be in a work.”
Asa Mease is an artist and printmaker living and working in Boulder, Colorado (USA). His approach to color highlights its materiality, and his meandering approach to printmaking is one of reproducibility and found images. His work in print, book arts, sculpture, and paint is rooted in a conceptual and research-based practice, and references products, artifacts, and ephemera, with a foundation in the practical and quotidian.
He currently has work included in The Nexus of Here, a show put on by members of Wave Contemporary in Portland, Oregon. After a recent relocation away from the Pacific Northwest, he is pursuing an MFA in Sculpture & Post-Studio Practices at the University of Colorado.
Implements for the Assessment & Removal of Post-Burn Conifers, 2021, Pine, hemlock, plywood, nylon webbing, enamel snaps, spray paint can, chainsaw chain, magnifying glass, ripstop nylon, chipboard, reflective tape, laminated color laser prints, flashe paint, plastic and stainless steel hardware, 4 X 4 X 10 inches.
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
Printmakers have to be choosy and wily in their selection of colors and limited layers. Each component has to contribute more to the image or object than its singular quality. If you are operating in the realm of found images, print ephemera, and the multiple, as a printmaker you are almost required to fall in love with CMYK, halftone, and the base unit of the dot. CMYK is that union where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but even then, we know that it is always a compression or distortion of the original source.
Additionally, I think that years of printmaking have rewired my artistic decision-making when I move to other mediums. When painting, I mix colors like I am preparing to screen print, and I use paint rollers, hand-cut stencils, and spray more than brushes. In my sculptural work I’d rather make a dozen of something than just one. I love the scaffolding of multiplicity that printmaking provides as it changes how precious and discrete any motion can be in a work.
During the pandemic, I was no longer able to work in the shared print shops I had been operating out of, so I shifted from reduction woodblocks, screen prints, and etchings to practices that could happen in my home, garage, garden, and workplace. For me, it wasn’t a question of not making prints anymore, but rather, how these other activities fulfill the same framework that printmaking follows: the edition, reproducibility, limited colors, and a tie to community. I found that the press was dispensable, but the core tenets of printmaking were not.
Work/Life Balance, 2021, Unfiltered cider from apples collected from six trees, glass bottles, plywood, flashe paint, laminated laser print ephemera, mylar, and metal hardware, 16 X 12 X 24 inches. Edition of 26.
“If you are operating in the realm of found images, print ephemera, and the multiple, as a printmaker you are almost required to fall in love with CMYK, halftone, and the base unit of the dot.”
Dirty Old Coins from Retail ($5.00), 2021, Stab bound artist book with color laser prints and thermal receipt paper, 5.5 X 8.5 inches. Edition of 10.
Are there specific associations towards color in your work?
My investigations into color shift depending on the conceptual framework I am operating within. The association is always pointing towards a use-case for color out in the world. For me, color selection is no different than selecting any other material to work with – and in handling the color in that way, it carries the physical qualities and associations of that color in the field.
For my book Dirty Old Coins from Retail ($5.00), I collected coins from the till at my retail job in the height of the pandemic. I was interested in highlighting the unnoticed tonal shifts within the seemingly identical monetary unit. It was at the point where many businesses were refusing cash, and we didn’t quite understand how the coronavirus was transmitted, so this exchange that I was having multiple times a day felt particularly raw and vulnerable. I needed some way to reclaim some of this labor-time as art-time. In the end, the patina of the object revealed itself when the coins were photographed and printed larger-than-life. Otherwise the book is quite spare in design and color use – the title page uses a single sheet of thermal receipt paper (printed during my shift) that outlines the criteria for coin collection.
In other projects my use of color is more affronting and brighter. The associations come from the visual language systems of institutions and image-makers that seemingly have no graphic or artistic agenda – the blue spray paint used to mark trees for removal in the Deschutes National Forest after recent forest fires, the chroma key green of film sets, color swatches from governmental pamphlets, or a Youtuber’s DIY camouflage tutorial for example.
Certified Backyard /\ Off Market Fixer, Chroma key green, acrylic paint, plywood, hardware, 24 X 36 X 14 inches.
Activated Charcoal (medium sudoku fully solved), Flashe and enamel paint, lump charcoal, and MDF, 24 X 24 inches.
Where do you reside between technical and intuitive in your work as an artist using color?
I worked as a bread baker for a few years after graduating college, and I think the same things that initially attracted me to printmaking, brought me into that profession as well. It is an intimate relationship between oneself and a few humble ingredients that result in something unequivocally sustaining. In printmaking, as in baking, there is a delayed feedback loop between the original concept and the final result, and in that in-between there is a lovely unknowing.
At the bakery I was making the same breads every day. They were mixed starting at 8 am, folded and shaped mid-morning, and put to bed in the walk-in by late afternoon. At 5 am the following morning I would bake them, and, though in form they were seemingly identical, I came to recognize the innumerable ways in which that same process could create different results. Maybe it was particularly hot in the kitchen, or the starter was more mature than other days, or perhaps last spring the Willamette Valley of Oregon received more rain than usual, effecting this batch of flour.
The process of baking started with recipes and timers and the kind-yet-hurried oversight of my boss, but eventually shifted to a more holistic activity. I think that the technical gets transmogrified through time into the intuitive. The quicker the feedback between a reference memory and the reciprocal action is, the more likely I am to attribute it to intuition, but its always coming from somewhere external to myself.
I often forget the mountains of ugly printmaking ink I have mixed over the years that allows me to accurately mix the color I am looking for today. There is so much information that gets internalized in the process of printmaking that is pulling from somewhere – a mentor, a tutorial at a print conference, an influential art show, or the uncountable mistakes that I have made. On several occasions in the print shop I have happened to mix the most lovely color for a woodblock, only to look down and realize I am wearing a t-shirt the exact same color.
Activated Charcoal (medium sudoku fully solved) (detail)