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Cranes in the Mist: A Visual Homage to Terminal 46

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The Port Morning

The Port, Morning, Digital Mixed Media Collage, 20″ x 27″

This piece from the new series in progress on Infrastructure is an appreciation of the cranes at Terminal 46 at the Port of Seattle. I took a photo with my phone in terrible lighting from the ferry as I was heading to Bainbridge Island. The very terribleness turned out to be exactly what I was looking for when I started working, although it took awhile for me to figure that out. I was drawn first to the collision of atmosphere and industry, and the elegiac sense of voyage and retrospect that the view from the ferry inspires. Then I fought for several weeks as I visited and revisited the image — fought with the very ‘industrialness’ that I loved in the first glimpse — exactly how bright do you want the floodlights to be anyway?? Aren’t those lights just basically ugly compared to the Rosy Dawn and the Dusky Gloaming? Along the way I have been learning a lot about what I’m actually looking at. (For instance, here you will learn everything you’ve ever wondered about the Terminal 46 lighting retrofit, and “foot candles” and pick up the term “light trespass.”) Embedded in this image are the textures of place collected from the Terminal and its surroundings.

The terminals are a place at the heart of recent controversies. The Port has pushed back on a proposal for a new third stadium in SODO, questioning the effect of yet another sports arena on the ability of the Port to get its trucks and trains through traffic. Simultaneously, coal trains could be coming soon if the coal port is approved at Cherry Point, with as many as 18 additional trains a day passing through the waterfront area and adding an estimated 90 minutes of traffic delays to an already congested area. If you would like to participate in what is sure to be a rousing civic event you may want to attend the panel discussion on the coal train proposal coming up at Town Hall on February 13th.

It is easy, if you are not a longshoreman or employed at the Port, to take the waterfront and a humming industrial infrastructure for granted. But as I did more research on Seattle’s maritime industry I came across remarkable stories and archival photographs documenting a history of upheaval. The site where crane number 54 sits once hosted Seattle’s own Hooverville. Between 1931 and 1941 over a thousand men called this home, living in a state of what a sociology student of the time termed “insane disorder.” This fascinating site documenting the Great Depression in Seattle tells the story. I stumbled across a fabulous image bank when I entered “Skinner and Eddy Shipyard 1918” in google. The link is too long to accurately place, but if you go to the image search you will find a trove of historical photographs of the waterfront, several of which have the epic quality of the opening scene of “Les Miserables.” The Port of Seattle website shows fascinating glimpses of the brutal labor history of our state with a portrait of Terminal 91 and The Battle of Smith Cove. WTO was just one in a long history of eruptions and disruptions. In spite of the Northwest’s stupefying natural beauty the people don’t seem to be pacified by it, and they don’t take social and economic change lying down.

Art that is about sense of place is inevitably also about history. If you capture place you enter a field of echoes.  The thousands of accumulated abrasions, erasures, collisions, decisions, accidents and intentions, the changing weather of time’s passage, is embedded in everything you see. This is close cousin to “patina,” and you can find the loveliness of surface imperfection mass manufactured at Pottery Barn or the aptly named Pier 1. But it is also real, and it is everywhere around us in what is useful and working and necessary. It is a door into time.

Duwamish 2
Duwamish 2, Mixed Media Digital Collage, 30″ x 22

This morning I delivered a set of new large prints to the Seattle Art Museum Gallery, including “The Port” above. The framed prints range from 32 x 40 to slightly smaller, and will be up at the gallery in the next few days. In printing larger pieces it has been a wonderful experience to work with The Color Group. The ink on the new Canon 9400 has really breath-taking vibrance, and particularly on Hahnemuhle German Etching this printer takes the medium beyond what I’ve seen before, with a unique blending of surface qualities similar to silkscreen or traditional lithography. I hope you will stop in to see the work in person. *Update: the work seems to be flying out the door, so go soon! These are editions of 20 so if a piece is gone that you like you can contact me about additional prints. The Pale Cranes might be my favorite, and it went out before it even got up on the wall.

Conversation With Myself (while I waited for you to make up your mind….)

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Conversation With Myself

“Conversation With Myself, While I Waited for You to Make up Your Mind…..” © Iskra Johnson

This is the first in a new series about urban language. Composition assembled from the broken sentences around me: re-purposing. RE-listening, taking back the marks on the random public/private canvas.  Rewinding that David Byrne movie “Stop Making Sense.” I think I’ll call it The Wailing Wall. People just can’t stop talking.

Viktoria Viktoria Site Study: Future Residential on Second Avenue

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It is exhilarating beyond measure to be alive in Seattle during this endless Indian Summer. (By the way, before using this phrase, this being the city of all things politically correct, I spent an hour researching whether in fact it is politically okay to use this phrase. I am going to go with this: As the American Indians were reportedly the first to notice the loveliness of this time and to celebrate the harvest by looking at the light and perhaps smoking a pipe rather than engaging in more frantic scurrying, worrying and stacking of crops in the barn (as the pale settlers were wont), when the phrase is invoked by a non-Indian person caught up in the intoxicating Autumnal rhapsodies it is in fact an homage to the wisdom of the First Nations, and understood as such.) Whew.

So I walk around, temporarily off the hook, and I can’t help but notice but the city is damn fine beautiful. I am sure nature is also doing something, but the construction sites are in their prime, as in primary colors, none of this faded pink of cosmos and hydrangeas and plum feather grass. Give me the street, the baylight glinting on scaffolds and glass, the scattered jump rope song of grafitti and the fifteen people gathered to watch the man in the Mercedes try to park his car in the the lot on Second Avenue with one-sixteenth inch margin of error and a flawless polish on that fender. Pretty much anytime of day is good light, because we actually have light which makes, yes, shadow. If you live here, you know.

Here is a piece that will probably go through another fifty iterations, but which has landed here, comfortably, for the moment. The rule for this series, (thank you John Cage for pointing out how necessary rules are in your fine book Silence) are simple. All elements of photographic evidence must come from an actual construction site. Paint and other elements layered into the work may come from my drawing table.

ViktoriaViktoria_Construction_Project_Photocollage
ViktoriaViktoria, 24 x 19 inches, photocollage, © Iskra Johnson

 

What is a Transfer Print? (Artist Statement)

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In a transfer print the plate is created by printing files from a computer imaging program like Photoshop onto an acetate carrier sheet. For initial output I use an Epson 3800 with archival ink. After the carrier sheet is sprayed with a solvent  the ink becomes liquified enough to transfer to paper or another surface through careful burnishing. Alternatively the plate is pressed by hand or roller onto a sheet of paper that has been soaked with gel alcohol, a solvent that transfers the ink to the paper without harming the paper’s surface. Each paper takes the ink completely differently. Soft watercolor or printmaking papers may absorb the ink with a fair amount of predictability, while others react with magical surface qualities that have a life of their own. The effects range from the dry paper-texture of letterpress to a granulation similar to aquatint or the watery translucency of traditional monoprints.

It takes a great deal of repetition and attention to detail to pull one successful print. I have learned that timing, humidity, pressure, and subtle overprinting or vandalism of the same plate multiple times can all have an effect on the image and whether it succeeds. In many ways the moment of printing is like calligraphy in its exactitude, physicality and openness to the accidents of the moment.

The photographic transfer process allows me to work with the full-color lushness of photographic reality. Like traditional printmaking there is a plate, and it is hands on, but unlike traditional processes you can print all colors at once. I’m really trying to figure out where a photograph lives in the world now. I love the luminous intensity of photography when seen on screen, but when the computer shuts off the image is gone. Photographs on paper don’t have the same back-lit radiance, and unless they are very carefully printed on fine paper, they may feel less like a “print” and more like “output.” In some ways, with the dazzling improvements in retina display, the computer monitor version of a photograph may begin to feel more like the “original” and the paper print the lesser reproduction.  Our world now has trillions of images, with more being born every second, an endless stream of brilliant photographic candy flowing across our monitors and phones. The sheer volume and immediacy of images, the constant now leaves no time for absorption (or what used to be called “meaning”) and threatens to wear out our collective synapses. What can a print, a fixed piece of paper, offer in this new world?

I am interested in artifact, object, a thing of presence that arrests you, makes you pause, and puts you back in human-centered time. But I also think the human brain is being reconfigured by new technologies, and they can’t really be ignored. The way Photoshop builds images mirrors our minds and how we remember and layer experience. Photoshop also mirrors a printing press, with the ability to stack “plates” in layers, with each layer affecting the one below in truly magical ways that can only be done with this tool. What interests me is how the new media can be integrated with the old, the tactile with the digital.

The transfer process is time intensive and very sensual. Every inch of the image is transferred by the pressure of my hand as the damp paper takes the ink from the plate. It can take up to a dozen prints to get one that has just the right balance of subtle surface texture and ink density, and each print takes about an hour to completely transfer. The images layered into the final plate merge digital photographic elements, enlargements of older analog prints, and the other media I work in, such as powdered pigment and paint. It’s exciting to feel that two very different worlds can be integrated. Older ways of making are not “obsolete” — they can be revisioned and combined with the new in ways that reflect the complexity of what it is to be alive in this time.