Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency: R. Luke DuBois

LUKE DUBOIS TR. amarind I N S T I T U T E AT TAMARIND INSTITUTE

2018 FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY ARTIST RESIDENCY

Tamarind Master Printer and Workshop Manager Valpuri Remling.

Support provided by

FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY FOUNDATION

R. LUKE DUBOIS

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INTERVIEW: R. LUKE DUBOIS AT TAMARIND

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TECHNOLOGY

12 TAMARIND EDITIONS: STATE OF THE UNION 17 TAMARIND EDITIONS: CYMATICS 19 TAMARIND EDITIONS: OSCILLOGRAPHICS

Cover: State of the Union: Firearm Death Rates per 100,000 Population in High Income OECD Countries, 2019 (detail)

CONTENTS

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DuBois with his research and sketches in Tamarind’s artist studio.

FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY ARTIST RESIDENCY

The residency named for American abstract painter Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) creates an opportunity for an artist who is new to collaborative printmaking to come to Tamarind Institute and engage with the New Mexico community. In the process, there is the opportunity to consider Hammersley’s legacy as a painter and printmaker, and his work as an independent artist.

Artist, composer, and performer R. Luke DuBois (b. 1975 Morristown, New Jersey; lives and works in Brooklyn) received the Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency in 2018. DuBois is an active visual

and musical collaborator, and moved easily into the collaborative space of the Tamarind workshop.

Strange rumblings and vibrations were heard coming from the workshop during his residency as he

of chance, and the challenges of humanizing grim statistics.

DuBois is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data, and serves on the Board of Directors of the ISSUE Project Room. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University. His work is exhibited internationally and represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

DuBois at Tamarind. Photos by Sierra Shepard.

R. LUKE DUBOIS

experimented with sound and various tools, both digital and improvised, to create matrices that extend the lithographic medium. Marbles dipped in tusche and bits of litho crayon were set up to leave marks on a plate through rhythmic sound vibrations; a retro piece of electronic machinery known as an oscilloscope was used to generate elegant line patterns to transfer to plates; and data sets the artist collected on gun violence in the United States were animated and redrawn by hand. The resulting prints explore the graphic possibilities

INTERVIEW : R. LUKE DUBOIS AT TAMARIND 5

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Tamarind Director Diana Gaston and 2018 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency recipient R. Luke DuBois.

What were you anticipating when you started your collaboration at Tamarind?

I tried to come to Tamarind with an open mind and without many specific expectations. I’m not a printmaker, and had never touched lithography, though I have a lot of works on paper as part of my practice and was incredibly excited to be there.

I brought two unrelated ideas to the table—working with sound and print, and making work in response to the data visualization work W.E.B. Du Bois did for the 1900 Paris Expo—but I didn’t have a specific idea of how they were going to relate.

So I showed up in Albuquerque with a bunch of data sets on gun violence in America and my Telecaster and wasn’t really sure what was gonna happen next.

You work in a collaborative way, as a composer, musician, and artist. I’m curious to hear what kinds of adjustments you had to make in a workshop setting.

Tamarind Master Printer Valpuri Remling, and Apprentice

Printers Christine Adams and Jake Ingram were the best collaborators I could have hoped for, and their craft and expertise were integral to getting anything done. I learned an incredible amount from Valpuri, and was able to gain, by the end of my residency, a slight grasp on the limitless possibilities of lithography. The work the printers at Tamarind do is truly magical but also reflects a deep, intuitive understanding of the chemistry and physics underlying the process. It reminded me of working with an ensemble as a composer, where you could get into the nitty-gritty of the notes on the page with your performers to discuss how best to make them come alive. I hope the experiments we worked on together were as engaging for them as they were for me.

Your adaptation of an oscilloscope, among other electronic tools you employed during your residency, is somewhat reminiscent of how Frederick Hammersley took to the graphic potential of the

IBM mainframe computer at The University of New Mexico in 196970 for his computer drawings.

Can you talk about how you adapt technology to create visual imagery?

I’m a big fan of the strategic misuse of contemporary technology to make art that can, in some way, interrogate that technology in turn. I think Hammersley’s use of the Art 1 language is an exemplary tale. Computer punch cards were derived from the cards used to program the Jacquard loom, so it’s only fitting that Hammersley would code artwork that’s reflective of woven patterns. In the same vein, the oscilloscope has a physicality to it that we often forget. It’s basically an electron gun focused by magnets that you can use to draw with pure light.

Your approach for this project draws upon the data visualization pioneered by American civil rights activist, writer, educator, and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), which made visible the insidious nature of institutionalized racism.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about this early research and how it influenced your own work. Your various creative forms of data Oscilloscope in use by DuBois during his residency. Photo by Diana Gaston.

visualization explore very complex social issues. What prompted you to focus this series on gun violence?

W.E.B. Du Bois’ work with his colleagues for the 1900 Paris Expo was an act of rhetorical brilliance, leveraging the relatively novel technique of data visualization to tell the story of African Americans’ positive effect on the U.S. economy nearly 40 years after emancipation, despite all obstacles put in their way—by white society, by the failure of the U.S. government to live up to the promise of reconstruction, by the inability of America to address slavery in a restorative manner, preferring instead to “move past” it as quickly as possible. By using visual design to let the numbers speak for themselves, Du Bois was able to create a richly annotated, statistically bulletproof, unemotional case demonstrating the myriad, indisputable ways in which Black Americans were pulling their

weight in society at the turn of the last century.

A century later, I fear that the best things about Du Bois’ tactic—the proving of an argument with hard, well-sourced, unassailable statistics— has been turned against minorities and other vulnerable populations in America by anesthetizing us all with data. So in the case of gun violence, I’m of the opinion that data visualization, and the ease in which it’s used in contemporary discourse, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Every time a newspaper depicts the

violence affecting our society using a bar graph instead of a photograph, they are contributing to a trend that reduces people to numbers and gives all of us the emotional security blanket of “knowing the facts.” The problem here is that these facts hurt—they represent lives lost, lives devastated, communities destroyed, society disrupted. The victims of our failings as a society—on gun violence, on economic and social justice, on climate change, and so on—are people, not numbers, and so I set out to reframe Du Bois’ project in this manner by creating data portraits that embody this Valpuri Remling and DuBois reviewing proofs.

violence. So by taking the lithography process and injecting sonic disruption into it, I could create a sense that the lines in these graphs we made—lines that represent real people were harmed, for example blown up, broken, bleeding, at risk of being faded and erased, and so forth.

How do you see printmaking fitting in to your larger visual practice?

I do a lot of work with computers, but I don’t have a specific love for digital media within art objects, and I prefer to work with whatever medium or material

best suits the story I’m trying to tell.

It has been a few years since I really worked with print. 2010’s A More Perfect Union was designed as a works-onpaper series, and 2008’s Hindsight Is Always 20/20 was an immense project involving letterpress. I really loved my experience at Tamarind Institute, particularly because I was able to get close to the process, in a way that I’d never experienced with printing before.

I worry now, if anything, I’m spoiled, and I’ll never look at a piece of paper the same way again.

Visitors view computer drawings by Frederick Hammersley during the opening of Two-fold: A Pairing of Frederick Hammersley + Matthew Shlian at Tamarind, 2018.

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Oscilliscope with the Tamarind chop.

Printer sponging an aluminum plate drawn

by DuBois.

Frederick Hammersley Apprentice Printer Christine Adams with Master Printer Valpuri Remling. Photo by Luke DuBois.

DuBois in the artist studio creating images for the Cymatics series.

Marbles dipped in tusche were scattered across the plate, moving and leaving marks through sound vibrations. Photos by Diana Gaston (left) and Luke DuBois (right).

All lithographs were created in collaboration with R. Luke DuBois by the collaborative team of printers Valpuri Remling, Christine Adams, and Jake Ingram.

Luke was so eager, just like us, to try anything and everything as long as it used his composition as a rhythm. Sound can be translated in so many ways, and we experimented with its physical qualities — the repeating bass, the shaking of the drawing materials on the matrices.

It was not peaceful and quiet — and neither was the concept.

— Valpuri Remling

Clockwise: Capturing the movement of vibrating crayon in a tray.

DuBois modeling a favorite tshirt in the workshop.

Photo by Diana Gaston.

Frederick Hammersley Apprentice Printer Christine Adams.

Photo by Luke DuBois.

TAMARIND EDITIONS : STATE OF THE UNION

State of the Union: Mass Shootings in the U.S.A. 2014-2018, 2019 Four-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Paper Size: 25 x 31 1/2 inches Collaborating Printer: Christine Adams Edition of 20

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State of the Union: Mass Shootings in the U.S.A. 2014-2018 (detail)

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State of the Union: Firearm Death Rates per 100,000 Population in High Income OECD Countries, 2019 Six-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Paper Size: 25 x 31 1/2 inches Collaborating Printer: Jake Ingram Edition of 10

State of the Union: Firearm Death Rates per 100,000 Population in High Income OECD Countries (details)

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State of the Union: Gun Deaths in the U.S.A per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity 2016, 2019 Four-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Color Trial Proof 25 x 31 1/2 inches Collaborating Printer: Valpuri Remling Edition of 10

State of the Union: Gun Deaths in the U.S.A per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity 2016 (detail)

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TAMARIND EDITIONS : CYMATICS

Cymatics #1, 2019 Single-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Paper Size: 19 x 23 inches Collaborating Printer: Valpuri Remling Edition of 10 Cymatics #2, 2019 Single-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Paper Size: 19 x 23 inches Collaborating Printer: Jake Ingram Edition of 10 Cymatics #3, 2019 Single-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Paper Size: 19 x 23 inches Collaborating Printer: Christine Adams Edition of 10

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TAMARIND EDITIONS : OSCILLOGRAPHICS

Oscillographics #1, 2019 Single-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Paper Size: 19 x 23 inches Collaborating Printer: Jake Ingram Edition of 10

Oscillographics #2, 2019 Single-color lithograph on White Rives BFK Paper Size: 19 x 23 inches Collaborating Printer: Jake Ingram Edition of 10

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Tamarind Institute is a nonprofit center for collaborative printmaking, dedicated to research, education, and creative projects in fine art lithography.

Since the workshop’s founding in 1960, Tamarind’s printer training and print publishing program has set the standard in the field of collaborative printmaking around the world.

Tamarind Institute at The University of New Mexico with installation by Tamarind‘s first Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency recipient Matthew Shlian, Every Line Is A Circle If You Make It Long Enough, 2017.

Photograph by Nick Simko.

TI Namarind S T I T U T E The University of New Mexico 2500 Central Avenue Southeast Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106 505.277.3901 | tamarind.unm.edu

More information and videos created during this residency are available on Instagram @rlukedubois | @tamarindinstitute and at tamarind.unm.edu

TI Namarind S T I T U T E Published by Tamarind Institute, 2019 Designed by Shelly Smith