AN EXCESS OF PRODUCTION, 2023.
Softcover, approximately 450 pages, color and black and white, collected excess printing from previous book projects includes digital, Risograph, screen printed images, Wire-O bound, 3 color screen printed covers, 11 X 8.5″, 30 copies.
Print Shop is an installation of fifty screen prints, each with variations. The prints were made by hand, one at a time, on found paper and coated card stock using an analog process that falls somewhere between photography and painting. They are multiples but each is also unique. No one print is exactly the same as another.
The images were assembled from photographs and graphics in my collection. Some I return to again and again, like the picture of prop heads in Forrest J. Ackerman’s house, the Domus magazine covers, or photographs of ruins, feet, snakes, and early humans. These and other images have been repeatedly copied and altered. Repetition and reproduction is the process. The copy is the subject.
The prints are for sale, and multiple versions can be found in a flat file in the gallery.
January 20 – February 25, 2023
Et al., San Francisco
https://etaletc.com/matt-borruso-print-shop
Print Shop is an installation of fifty screen prints, each with variations. The prints were made by hand, one at a time, on found paper and coated card stock using an analog process that falls somewhere between photography and painting. They are multiples but each is also unique. No one print is exactly the same as another.
The images were assembled from photographs and graphics in my collection. Some I return to again and again, like the picture of prop heads in Forrest J. Ackerman’s house, the Domus magazine covers, or photographs of ruins, feet, snakes, and early humans. These and other images have been repeatedly copied and altered. Repetition and reproduction is the process. The copy is the subject.
The prints are for sale, and multiple versions can be found in a flat file in the gallery.
January 20 – February 25, 2023
Et al., San Francisco
https://etaletc.com/matt-borruso-print-shop
Screenprints (unique), one and two colors, approximately 22 x 18″ on found vintage paper, 2021.
Urs / Matt Borruso – Ellie Hunter
In Borges’ mythical realm Tlön, objects are created by being thought. Before this inception, these objects are almost duplicates of lost objects, similar to those whose migration across mediums generate the ideas and relationships revealed within the exhibition. Even stranger and more perfect than the other objects brought into being on Tlön is the ur – “a thing produced by suggestion, an object brought into being by hope,” or in this case, by seeing, via the specter of the artist.
October 23 – 24, 2021
1599fdT, Mill Valley, CA
Zoo
September 11 – December 1, 2021
Hit Gallery, San Francisco
The Age of Collage Vol.3: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art
edited by Dennis Busch and Francesca Gavin, Gestalten Press, 2020
An online screening of George Kuchar videos selected by Matt Borruso
Friday, September 4 at 7pm PDT, Streaming on TWITCH
Seaside Show, (20 min, 56 sec), 2008
Faulty Fathoms, (13 min, 46 sec), 2006
Kingdom By The Sea, (19 min, 02 sec), 2002
In George Kuchar’s video Seaside Show (2008) there is a small amount of footage from the opening reception at San Francisco’s 2nd floor projects for Kuchar – paintingsdrawingspaintingsdrawingspaintings 1970s to 1980s. This was a 2008 show of George and Mike Kuchar’s 2D work, rarely seen in a gallery setting.* I was at this opening, and when I watched this scene in 2020 it was like time kind of collapsed. I kept expecting to see my old self looking out at my current self. It’s just footage of a lot of people I know looking a bit younger doing all the things that we did—up until recently. The faces, the clothes, the room, everything looked pretty much the same as it would today. It was all so familiar. The documentary aspect of George Kuchar’s work is rarely mentioned, but his camera recorded so much—images of San Francisco, New York, lost artworks, artists, students, gallery openings, film festivals and screenings. His generous voiceover is like the anti-Werner Herzog—warm, enthusiastic, seemingly delighted to commune with others, and excited by food and bodily functions.
The San Francisco Art Institute, which (prematurely) announced its closure in March of this year, was also a big part of the Kuchar universe. George moved to San Francisco from New York in 1971 because of a teaching opportunity at the school. He became a huge presence there, and his weekly Psychotronic Film course in Studio 8 went on to influence so many. I always saw him around when I was an undergraduate student at the school in the late 90s and early 2000s. I began teaching there in 2006, and I clearly remember George bursting into one of my grad seminars in a panic because he had locked himself out of the faculty office and couldn’t get to his bicycle. When I watched Seaside Show it reminded me of both my years as an undergrad, and the time when I had just started teaching.
Seaside Show presents George and SFAI as many will remember them, and Kingdom By The Sea (2002) and Faulty Fathoms (2006) are like links in the same nautically titled chain. The prop room in Studio 8 shows up again and again with new props but also the same props. It’s like time is just oscillating, never quite moving forward or backwards. George looks almost the same, the SFAI tower appears again and again, the San Francisco Bay relentlessly laps up against the sea wall. Different students and different scenarios, but George’s voice remains constant. There are versions of George and SFAI that have disappeared, but other versions live on through the images in these videos and the memories they evoke.
—Matt Borruso, 2020
* In 2016 Gordon Faylor and I interviewed Mike Kuchar, discussing his drawings and the Kuchars’ connection with underground comics and graphic design. You can find that interview HERE.
YALE UNION
800 SE 10th Ave
Portland, OR 97214
Printed Publics: Contemporary Art and Design Publishing in the Bay Area
December 7, 2019–August 31, 2020
Floor 2, Koret Education Center
Organized by David Senior, Head of Library & Archives
sfmoma printed publics
sfmoma open space printed publics
SFMOMA’s long history of connecting Bay Area artists and art-publishing presses continues with Printed Publics, the museum library’s look at printed matter being produced by local artists and designers of today. These publications play with the structural elements of the book, the page, and new and old printing tools to create new work. Central to the idea of publication—literally embedded in the word—is a “public,” and Printed Publics examines publishing as a means of community building, information sharing, and collaboration.
Many of the works presented here can be handled and flipped through, offering visitors the unique opportunity to interact with artworks in an intimate and personal way. Through these books and magazines, independent publishers necessarily develop creative, informal methods for small-scale distribution of their projects, offering new spaces for conversations about their practices. Printed Publics also highlights the SFMOMA Library’s continued engagement with local publishers in building the collection at the museum.
Participating publishers:
Sming Sming Books, LAND & SEA, Eggy Press, Jessalyn Aaland/Current Editions, Visible Publications, Mitsu Okubo, RITE Editions, no place press, Colpa Press, NIAD Art Center, RE/Search Publications, Floss Editions, The Black Aesthetic, Tiny Splendor, [2nd floor projects], Publication Studio SF, Most Ancient, Stripe SF, David Wilson, TBW Books, Wolfman Books, Night Diver Press, illetante collective & Barbara Stauffaucher Solomon.
You Live
Sunsets, sunrises, eclipses, meteorites, early humans, artificial humans, constructed identities, masks, film sets, props, underground, outer space, green screens, the holodeck, simulations, replication, scans, grids, logos, screen shots, downloads, the void, places I have been, places I have lived, people we admire, people who have betrayed us, people who have died, spiral staircases, forking paths, the multiverse, the repetition of days, things that could have been, snakes, and snakes eating other snakes.
A life built out of images. Dissolving, one into another. At the midpoint between two images a third image appears. Connections are made and years pass. The sequence continues moving towards the horizon which recedes into the distance.
These contextual images without a subject become the subject. The images are the territory. Data becomes substance. Films reveal themselves as films during their final scenes. Meanwhile, you live.
September 6th – October 19th, 2019
Et al., San Francisco
