At 355 West McDowell Road is a small artist space filled with brightly colored art on the walls, zines displayed on shelves and ink discs covered in dark green ink. The faint scent of paper and ink fills the air. The space has three large tables with various machinery tucked against the walls.
Paper Jam + Print has four artists working collaboratively in its space. Charissa Lucille, owner of Wasted Ink Distro and manager of Phoenix Zinefest Angie Dell, owner of Shut Eye Press and Julian and Victoria Silva, who own SATURNHEX.
Coming together
Each of these artists specializes in a different medium. Lucille is primarily a publisher and zine maker, Dell uses letterpress to make their art, Julian Silva is a 3D artist and Victoria Silva is a 2D artist.
The artists joined together to find a space in November of last year after they had met Lucille and realized they needed more space to continue their art.
“Angie and I were working on our project outside and kind of loosely brainstorming, like ‘what can we do, what can it be?’” Lucille said. “And then I met Vic and Juilian and they came into Wasted Ink and said ‘This is kind of what we’re interested in,’ like having a space that’s collaborative, community-based, that people can make art in.”
Because they all had a common goal, it made sense to find a space they could all work in.
“We were all just kind of looking for the same thing,” Dell said. “A space for creative collaboration, a space to bring together our various tools.”
Each of the artists had their own struggles with what conditions they were working in at the time. Dell had been printing in their garage prior to Paper Jam + Print.
“For most months out of the year, sometimes deep summer, [I was] suffering away,” Dell said. “I do not have a climate controlled garage and so all my equipment was starting to rust from being exposed to the elements and I’m the letterpress printer so I have a couple of presses and a few other pieces of equipment that got kind of rusty. So it was time.”
Lucille had run out of space in their house to store the zines that they were printing for Wasted Ink Distro.
“I had always printed zines at home and stored the online inventory for Wasted Ink [Distro] at my house,” Lucille said. “In the last few years it just got to a point where there was no more room and I knew that in order to keep things running smoothly and also for my own sanity, I do need to kind of separate things a little bit.”
Julian and Victoria Silva were also running out of space in their house, and needed more room for their equipment and art.
“Because most recently, just working out of our one bedroom studio, trying to make things work — which we did, for a while,” Julian Silva said. “And just figuring out how we could expand and actually have the space to work on projects, bring other people in, showcasing the tools that we have and just the resources we have to other people as well.”
Different mediums, same passion
In Paper Jam + Press, each of the artists have their own specialized medium. The different mediums create a vibrant space for creativity to flow.
Directly to the right of the entrance into the space sits a 1911 Chandler & Price platen press. It’s a wooden desk with a glass top, a shelf hung on the wall filled with tins of ink, and a tall dark wooden cabinet to the left of the desk with a 1905 Sigwalt printing press.
This is where Dell creates art and operates Shut Eye Press. They had bought the printing presses from other printers to use for their business. Dell says that they are the fourth owner of the printing press they currently own and they appreciate the history that is behind the press.
“There’s a blog that tracks all the VanderCook [printing presses] all over the country and who owns them, who used to own them. People into letterpress are pretty big history nerds a lot of times, and so you get to have a lot of insight,” Dell said.
“I don’t know, it feels like a stewardship. I’ll pass this [Chandler & Price printing press] on at some point to somebody and hopefully they’ll keep — you know, it was made in such a way that it could last if it’s taken good care of, who knows how long. They don’t make machines like that [anymore].”
They dove into their art after taking an ASU artist book class, a type of art that employs the different senses and uses them within a book containing images, text or whatever the artist decides.
“I was just intrigued by the title of it and I went to that first class and came out and had this feeling like I’ve never had before,” Dell said. “I just kind of sat for a few hours after the class and I just had this thing repeating in my head where I was like, this is it. I don’t know much about it, but I know this is it for me, and I really have to go into it.”
Shortly after, they tried letterpress in the class and chose that to be their primary medium.
“I think I latched onto letterpress because similar to Julian I have that sort of mechanic crafting mind,” Dell said. “Like I love to make things work. I love to use my hands to create and as frustrating as the press is sometimes, I love tinkering with it and figuring out what it needs to run and I love that it uses my whole body too.”
Dell loves the style of art they create because of the collaborative nature of it.
“What I love about it so much is, it really is a combination of so many different types of art,” Dell said.
To the left of the entrance is Wasted Ink Distro: A table filled with printers, a filing cabinet filled with zines and Lucille’s first zine displayed on a shelf next to ink drums.
Lucille got interested in publishing zines as they were finishing their last semester of college.
“It really felt like a necessity because I was in my last semester of journalism college and was feeling like I didn’t have a place for my voice and opinions,” Lucille said. “As a print journalist, I was told to minimize posting opinions online, to never be seen at protest unless I was covering it, there was a lot that really minimized me. I’m a very opinionated person. I was kind of complaining about this to a friend and she said, ‘Well, why don’t you make a zine?’ and I was like ‘What?’ And then a month later I made my first one.”
When Lucille first started making zines, they weren’t as familiar with digital editing and layout as they are now.
They describe their first zine as a “cut, copy, paste situation where everything was just printed out and then put together physically.”
Lucille sees zines as a way for people to express themselves, in whatever form they so choose.
“You’ll see a lot that they’re [zines] small self-published magazines, but in my mind, they’re more like snapshots of a person’s expression,” Lucille said. “They can be collaborative, they can be individual. They can contain a variety of content from poetry, writing, photography, long form essays, fiction, illustrations, comics, it’s this really wide umbrella.”
Zines are also a way for people to express their opinions in a raw, unfiltered way. This is something that Lucille views as a key element of zines.
“They are individually published and unedited, and uncensored,” Lucille said. “So people’s culture and experiences really shine through without being edited out or completely erased, which is a great way for historically marginalized people to have their voices represented.”
Julian and Victoria Silva run SATURNHEX. Their art is a combination and collaboration of 3D and 2D art. Directly in front of the door, on the far wall, is a board that displays their neon prints, old framed posters and science fiction books.
Victoria Silva originally started out as an illustrator, which is typically a digital medium, but it didn’t quite fit for her.
“I always felt that there was a disconnect to the stories I wanted to create and how I wanted to create them to be — a lot of my creativity comes from my dreams,” Victoria Silva said. “So I always struggled to find — like, ‘Where do I fit?’”
Victoria discovered risograph, a type of printing that layers different colors on top of each other to create an image. This medium allowed her to express her dreams in the way she wanted.
“It finally clicked, like this is the medium I want, this is the medium for me to help convey the stories and the dreamlike quality that comes with it,” Victoria Silva said. “It’s really fun, I’m able to explore things that I put on the backburner for so long because I didn’t know how to even make them. [Now] I’m able to do that.”
Julian Silva prefers 3D art because he says he likes to create in a “physical sense,” where he can put the pieces together as he’s working.
“My drawing abilities aren’t fantastic,” Julian Silva said. “But, if I can put something together, that’s what I love to do.”
However, Julian Silva is interested in the combination of 2D and 3D art. This interest was piqued by the printing presses and machinery that the other Paper Jam +Print creatives work with.
“Risograph, screen printing, letterpress, I’m excited about the real, very physical ways of making prints and artwork that are two-dimensional,” Julian Silva said. “So I think that’s what drew me to like these ways of creating prints.”
Julian Silva uses various mediums to create his art, including metalwork, woodwork and 3D printing Often these mediums are associated with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers, but Julian Silva believes that these mediums offer more opportunities for creative pursuits.
“I think a lot of people think of 3D printing as like an engineer,” Julian Silva said. “Like, they don’t understand we can make art — I think as artists, we can take a lot of freedoms and what we make doesn’t have to work really. It doesn’t have to be [functional], but it’s functional in a different way.”
Create together
The major focus for the group is to have a space for all artists to meet, create and build a community.
Victoria Silva said having a communal space for artists impacted her life for the better.
“Our [Julian and I’s] background is in Makerspace [at ASU] and we both met at Makerspace, and we both bonded together,” Victoria Silva said. “We’re really passionate about community spaces and making tools and things accessible. That’s what we hope to do with this space.”
They hope to use the space to offer resources and support for other artists, and to prevent any artist from experiencing the lack of support that they had all experienced before.
“Thinking through our experiences, what we needed and what was our barrier, what was stopping us, and it always came back to space,” Julian Silva said. “There was no open space for us to use. So I think a lot of this is our experiences and thinking through what we need and if we need this, I think other people and other artists could benefit from.”
One part of their motivation to share their space with others is derived from their experience in academics.
“We’re all teachers too. So I think that at least, I felt really motivated by the idea that the way that I was brought into book arts, or you know we all do some kind of variation on printmaking and, or book art,” Dell said. “I wanted to make it accessible. I had learned through academia. I was working full-time at ASU for a while and kind of got started there and it was wonderful. I just felt like we needed to open up a little bit more into the community.”
The other part was to make this type of art more accessible to the wider community of artists and to the public. Lucille created Wasted Ink Distro with the focus of breaking down barriers that were stopping artists from creating and publishing their work.
“But then I realized that there were a lot more barriers, even before the distribution. Part of making a zine or publication where printing is a huge barrier, whether it’s cost or basic knowledge, there’s so many things that can get in the way,” Lucille said. “And so, furthering that mission of helping people distribute their art, I want to make it even more easier and provide strictly printing for zines.”
Ultimately, all of the artists at Paper Jam + Print want to give creative control fully back to the artists, where they can try new things, make a mess and discover more about their art.
“One of the things we’re passionate about too is, we’ve noticed that artists don’t necessarily have the means to experiment or explore. Like a lot of the art making process in terms of publishing or the printing has always been hands-off, like you create something and you send it off and then you wait for it to come back and you hope it’s the way you want it,” Julian Silva said.
“And I think that’s a big goal here, you can take ownership of that whole process. And, not only can you take ownership of it, you can experiment and you can explore and you can make mistakes, and you can figure out what works for you.”
Contact the reporter at icaro@asu.edu
