steve roden
monotype residency at aurobora press, june 2006
22 works on paper, a combination of monotype and hand drawing processes.

in june of 2006 i was invited up to san francisco for a residency at aurobora press. i worked for 8 days on a series of works on paper, printing with a master printer during the day using various monotype processes, and worked with drawing and handwork at night. i ended up with 22 finished works of various sizes.

instead of arriving with a plan, a score, or a pre-determined conceptual umbrella, i decided to arrive with half a plan - to allow the printing process to suggest possible moves as opposed to trying to force the process to fulfill pre-determined expectations.

my half a plan involved the presence in the work of two disconnected inspirations - one was the use of objects related to sound to generate imagery such as: using a player piano roll or other mechanical instrument scores as stencils, placing old audio tape on the paper to block ink in a linear pattern, inking up an old 78rpm record or it's sleeve as a plate, inking and running some old speaker cones through the press, creating xerox transfers of old magazine images of audio speakers, etc... the other thing present in each work is the use of a series of 480 colored notations related to buckminster fuller's first pre-fab geodesic dome for the ford motor company (the parts list included 30 red, and 90 each of yellow, orange, green, blue, and violet parts). this parts list comes from a beautiful little color coded sketch fuller did in the 50's that i have always loved.

in the end, each work has some relationship to both sound and to building a form out of 480 color coded parts. alongside these things is the attempt to allow the printing process itself to trigger visual decisions. i love old printed ephemera such as book covers, record albums, packaging, etc. so it made a lot of sense that i ended up responding to using mylar as a plate to generate blocks of flat colors, shapes defined by cut edges of paper rather than a brush line or a pencil line - flat colored shapes that could only come about through the printing process - and that i have never been happy with in painting or drawing. the works were not planned out, but evolved organically, allowing the results of each run through the press to determine a next move.

in the end i still have no real conceptual framework to connect fuller's parts to the remainders of old sound carriers; but i'm interested as always in what this open and unresolved relationship between the two can create - and what formal and conceptual dialogues can come about through it.



here are some of the finished works and details:

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