Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting

I’ve been threatening to get back into screenprinting for far too long, so this exhibition of prints pushing the medium far beyond its apparent limits seemed like it would provide a good nudge. Not a lot of the content really spoke to me, but this show was really more about technique, and in that regard, much of what was on display was astonishing. In all my years in the game, I can’t say I’ve ever knowingly encountered a 91-color screenprint, but that’s what the Brand X Editions studio did for this Chuck Close joint:

Mind-boggling as the thought of 91 pulls is, especially over 28 square feet, translating that composition’s flat colors to a series of stencils is at least comprehensible (and the room with that print included about a dozen proofs showing the buildup of color throughout different stages of the printing process). But other work, like this 47-color piece from Emily Mae Smith, strains my understanding—which I previously thought was rather well-informed—of color separation’s possibilities:

That strained understanding made this show a bit frustrating; considering its organizing principle was a specific studio’s application of a specific medium, only a passing glance at the actual screenprinting process was provided. And while the exhibition credited the chromists who handled the prints’ color separations, no insight into that arcane discipline was provided. I can’t help but wonder if the curators thought viewers would be disillusioned to learn it’s “just done with computers.” My cursory research after the fact has so far merely reminded me that the results of most web searches having anything to do with screenprinting assume you’re trying to make t-shirts. Hopefully someday I’ll get to the bottom of it.