Leah Beeferman

As the inaugural Island Press Emerging Artist Fellow in summer 2016, Beeferman’s original idea was to see how—or if—the material processes of printmaking could translate the quality of immateriality typically present in her digital work. We thought about a few things as starting points: picking colors that could print very solid and deep, despite simply going down flat; playing with the idea of the print surface, and how to make the flat shapes feel like they were suspended in a space deeper than the paper; and working with digitally printed forms alongside stenciled or print-made forms to play with what is material, what is done by hand, and what is mechanical. The blues are inks mixed to match Pantone colors similar to what Beeferman normally uses on the computer (RGB 0, 0, 255), and the yellow is a nod to CMYK (process yellow). The three digital images are 1) drawn in Photoshop 2) scanned aluminum foil 3) taken from a video still of a volcano eruption, and colorshifted. They add to the question of what is material and what is digital, as they all are both material and digital, in varying degrees.