Inside the Studio Where Aerial Photography Turns into Prints That Last Forever | My Space

[whirring]

[Artist] The printer essentially

has been re-appropriated as my paintbrush.

I'm using a lot of different processes and techniques

that kind of try to bridge out beyond

and transcend the traditional two-dimensionality

of the photograph.

I essentially can

image ...

onto virtually any substrate.

It allows me to essentially build up

a layer of acrylic onto the surface of my materials.

The current body of work that I'm doing uses printing,

and acrylics

and Anthropocene

dry materials, whether it's aluminum panels

or it's polystyrene.

I am currently making large scale paintings

that are derived from photography.

In 2015, I called NASA up and I said

that I wanted to join them as an artist

on one of their missions that was flying over Greenland

to essentially learn more about

what was happening to the ice sheets,

and I was permitted onto

some flights that were being flown by one of the missions

called Operation IceBridge.

Luckily, the plane that NASA was flying

on the first mission that I went out on with them

was a C-130, it's a Hercules,

it's a military transport jet.

And at that time the C-130s had small drop windows

that were by the foot of the pilot.

That window was probably the best seat in the house.

For me it's about just gathering up as much

as I can, as much data as I can.

And then I took it back to my studio.

Essentially, I mean I do very,

very minimal retouching on the images.

I'm mostly just trying to reduce

the image to its most basic,

essential form.

The machine is a, essentially an ink jet acrylic printer.

So it sprays the acrylic down,

the acrylic monomers down onto a surface,

and then a UV light passes over the acrylic

and polymerizes it.

With this polymerization process,

we can adhere the acrylic onto virtually any surface.

Acrylic is essentially a plastic.

It's a plastic like material,

so I coined the term plasticine printing.

So kind of like we're in the Anthropocene

and one of the markers of the Anthropocene

is how much plastic is in the fossil record;

it's one of the five markers.

And then the fact that I'm layering down plastic

on the surface.

A traditional photograph is very fragile.

It's printed on paper,

which is essentially decomposing as it's

sitting in front of you,

whereas this material is not.

A print like this behind me, upon production

will enter itself into the fossil record,

because it's not gonna break down.

Between the acrylic that's on the surface

to the actual substrate of itself.

The material is hyper-archival.

[calm music]