Melissa West

My “Headshot/Mugshot” series is an exercise in presentation and perception.

There have been three sources of inspiration leading to this series. The first, social and mainstream media have focused lately on how young men of color are portrayed in the news. Who is represented with a mugshot? Who is represented with a headshot? Questions of racial and class privilege are raised.

The second, a paper presented at a neuro-aesthetics conference I attended suggested that we as humans are quicker to perceive difference than similarity when presented with a face that is morphed between two individuals. What makes somebody ‘different’?

The third is the Dadaist game of Exquisite Corpse, where different artists each draw different sections of a body and then combine them.

For these portraits, I’ve deliberately made the backgrounds colors that are not in the spectrum of human skin tones. I’ve also deliberately homed in on the facial features, not giving any social or gender cues such as hair or clothing. And in some of the portraits, all of the features belong to the same person; in others, they are mixed up.

When you look at these portraits, do any of the faces look scary? Do any of them look friendly? Why do you think that is?

When you look at these portraits, do you try to assign any racial or ethnic identity to them? Why do you think that is?

When you look at these portraits, do you try to assign a gender identity? Why do you think that is?

My birthday was in June, and my present from Sarah-Hope was a new set of four Pfeil carving tools. I’ve been saving them until I started carving my giant 3-foot-square linoleum block for the Roadworks Printmaking Festival at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Yesterday was the day! And wow. These tools are AWESOME.

I was so excited to start this block, and to start using these tools, that I made a little video.

By the end of the afternoon, much progress had been made.

This is an idea I’ve entertained for quite some time: a print series about the Pacific Gyre and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. To put it briefly, a whole lot of the stuff we throw out, especially plastics, winds up floating in the North Pacific. This is bad. It kills animals and fish. It destroys ecosystems. And it’s all our fault.

I finally hit upon the idea of showing a small marine world contained inside a plastic bottle. The prints will be a combination of linoleum block and monoprint. Here’s the master bottle being carved, along with three fish drawn on their blocks.

Here are the fish carved and proofed. They are, clockwise from the top of the piece of paper, a surgeonfish, a mahi-mahi, a Pacific bonito, and a jack, all fish that are found in the region of the gyre.

Inside the plastic jug will be an undersea world – created entirely of plastic. I mean that literally and figuratively. I am using plastic trash to make the monoprints. In these drying backgrounds I’ve used plastic string bags that once held onions to create the netting.

Future layers will be made using latex gloves, zip ties, bottle caps, coffee lids, and 6-pack rings (to name a few). I wasn’t even sure plastic 6-pack rings were still in use; living in California and not drinking beer in cans give one a limited view of such things. I was tickled, though not really, to find them today in my local grocery store. I remember my mother, way back when I was a small child, sternly telling my sisters and me that these rings should always be cut apart with scissors before they were thrown out, so birds and animals wouldn’t get caught in them. Frankly, I’m rather shocked that we haven’t figured out a better way, after all this time, to bind together our recreational beverages. But even though it’s evil, this set of rings will make great shapes on the prints. (And I will certainly cut them up and recycle them after printing.)

I’m hoping to have a few of these finished in time to be included in Ink | Paper | Print, the MPC Printmakers Club show at the Felix Kulpa gallery in August. Stay tuned!

p.s. This is the first time I’ve used my new Ternes-Burton registration pins. They are great! I have never had such accurate and easy registration before. If you are considering using them, I say go for it.

¿Dónde está Martín Getsemany Sánchez García?

During a march in Chilpancingo, Martín’s relatives, from Zumpango, Guerrero, carried a large banner with a picture of his. “He is close, loved,” a relative says. “He is the fifth child in a family of eight. He is 20 years old. He is inquisitive, curious. He loves playing soccer and is a Cruz Azul supporter”.

He is also, as pointed out by her cousin, “a boy with a will to keep going forward. That’s why he enrolled in the teaching school”.

On September 26, 2014, forty-three students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Normal School in Guerrero, Mexico, were loaded by police into unmarked vans and driven away. The students have not been seen since. Widespread searches have discovered many mass graves in the state of Guerrero, but only one body has been positively identified as that of a student.

The kidnapping of the students sparked mass protests throughout Mexico. It epitomized the corruption of the government and the use of money and resources from the so-called war on drugs against average citizens rather than against the drug lords.

As part of the protests, artists around the world created – and are still creating – portraits of the missing students. You can see some of the artwork here and here and here.

I’ve been working on a portrait of one of the students, Martín Getsemany Sánchez García, as part of the Printmakers for the Ayotzinapa 43 project.

My idea was to make a print that looked like a blackboard, to honor the chosen profession of these students. I made full-bleed monoprints that more or less look like slate with swipes of white to look like erased chalk.

Martín is carved out of linoleum, but the image is based on a loose pencil sketch; I wanted him to look like a portrait drawn in chalk. I like the unintended consequence that he looks rather ghostly, or like a photo negative. I think it evokes the mystery still surrounding the whereabouts of the students.

For his name, I also wanted it to look like somebody had written it on the blackboard. I didn’t want it to look like my handwriting, or even like any North American handwriting. We have a different style of script than most Europeans or South Americans use. So I wrote an email to my friend Jacques in France asking him to write out Martín’s name and send it to me – which he very kindly did, even though he thought the request a little bit odd. But he knows artists are eccentric types.

I had meant to transfer Jacques’ writing as a trace monotype, but for white ink to show clearly enough against a dark background it needs to be applied heavily – which resulted in an illegible mess.

Now I am hurriedly carving a block to print Martín’s name.

The first showing of some of the Ayotzinapa prints will be next Sunday, May 17, at the Guelaguetza festival in Santa Cruz.