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Posts by drewludwig

20
Oct

TOP OF THE HILL, Drew Ludwig, 2015 MFA Photo

The snow is falling and the road to the printing press is about to be closed for the season. YES YES YES it is true. I have found a spot, a roof, a ventilation system and a heating source to house this little offset press. A great success. Bad news, It sits at 10,565 feet and the only road to its door will soon become a ski run only to reopen to 4X4 traffic in May. Back to the good news; there is a free Gondola that takes me right there and they even give out woolen blankets for the cold ride. NO NEED FOR A ROAD! The home of the press, and the soul of our little publication, THE DUMBSAINT, is atop the U S of A’s only public Gondola and may be, and hopefully so, the highest press in the world. Probably not but I will refrain from googling in the off chance my assumption is right. Guilty until proven innocent.

For a little context/perspective here are a few floor plans, photos and other reference points for you to definitively know, without question, where THE DUMBSAINT shall be entombed between the towns of Telluride, CO and Mountain Village, CO. For those that demand more precision : (37degrees 55minutes and 51.8 seconds North by 107 degrees 49 minutes and 56.82 seconds West)

THIS IS A SKI MAP WITH BOOM HOT PINK STAR WHERE PRESS AWAITS

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THIS IS A TOURIST BROCHURE WITH BOOM HOT PINK STAR WHERE PRESS AWAITS

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THIS IS A PHOTO TAKEN FROM TELLURIDE LOOKING UP WITH BOOM HOT PINK STAR OVER PRESS PALACE

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FLOOR PLAN OF PRESS PALACE WITH RAINBOW EXPLOSION COMING FROM EXACT POINT WHERE PRESS AWAITS

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THIS I WHAT THE PRESS LOOKS LIKE IN THE ROOM WHERE RAINBOW EXPLOSIONS WILL Emanate (sticks and pipes and yard tools will be cleaned out after the first of the year):

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THIS IS WHAT THE TRUCK LOOKED LIKE THAT WAS CARRYING THE PRESS FROM CALIFORNIA (rainbow explosion housed behind SAIA door):

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AND HERE IS A PICTURE OF THE ASCENSION VIA THE GONDOLA. A path to the promised land free of charge and open to the public and even your pets can ride too.

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So now you know the WHERE. Other good news. Picked up a huge paper cutter and a load of free oil based inks from a printing press in Denver (seven hour one way drive) that was going out of business, so now we have color and a way to trim the final product. Other good news … a lovely lovely lovely human being whom graduated from the RISD printmaking department is going to come out in January and put the pieces of the press back together. I had to pull a humpty dumpty to ship the beast out here and now I don’t know if I or the all the king’s men could put this thing back together. Luckily Julia is on the case and will be out here soon with all her knowledge and a snow board or two.

Other updates. We received a local grant for our first publication to come flying off the press in February. I have a collaborator in chief on the project, her name is Katie Klingsporn and she inspires me on many fronts (http://katieklingsporn.com). The town is sooo ready for a little print culture and there is anticipation for our first publication. I am still working with Telluride Arts, the local arts non-profit in Telluride, to establish a large art center in the core of town. Think RISD works or one of AS220’s communal workspaces. We are still in the planning stage of this and working with Artspace (artspace.org) a national nonprofit working towards developing space for the creative process on a community scale.

The Maharam Fellowship is coming to a close and none of this would be possible without the assisting funds contributed by Maharam and the mentorship of Kevin Jankowski over at the RISD career center. Seriously, if anyone is reading this drop what you are doing and go over and pay Kevin a visit right now and ask him just about anything and await a deeply felt response and sense of connection to the wonder in the world! I learned a great great great deal from him and am most grateful for his time and assistance through this process.

Come out to Telluride anytime and visit me, the press and THE DUMBSAINT. Either that or keep checking in with me so you can get on our mailing list to receive a copy of THE DUMBSAINT!!

thedrewludwig@gmail.com

9
Aug

Space to Make the Things, Drew Ludwig, ’15Photo

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The internship is going swimmingly. Backstroking at the moment and checking out the view of the summer so far. I am about halfway through. I have no return ticket to Providence, so I can take a bit longer to help the arts along around here. Maybe the rest of my life? Whoa commitment coming from someone who as been associated with such figures as Peter Pan and other mythical creatures whom practice the art of levity. Grad school turned me into more of an aspiring Dorthy from the land of OZ and you could kind of make the analogy that every art project I worked up over those two years at RISD was a little click of the red art shoes. There is no place like home … there is no place like home. 
 
The red shoe enemy … wicked witch of high rent
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Ok so I am here and trying my best to change the world through art but it is tough. Silly tough and requires me to think about it all day long. It is in every conversation and in every dream and rarely do I find myself thinking about much of anything beyond art, community and how I should be eating healthier food as last nights hot and sour soup from Shanghai Palace is really doing a number of me. URG I think MSG stands for “My Stomach Gurts.” That is a new word that combines gurgle and hurt. The really hard part is finding the space where I can transfer the thoughts into the things (art objects). Of course deep deep down I don’t think the things matter as much as the making of the things, but you still need space for process. We have plenty of space in town for the showcasing of the things at the linear end of artistic production: galleries, showrooms, large empty second homes, pop up galleries, murals, coffee shops, stages and an insane amount of theatres. We need more places for the making of the things and preferably in town as this is vital to our sense of self; our sense of community. And it only makes sense that something so vital should immenate from the core or center of town.
 
Photo of MSG kind of looks like fiberglass cocaine
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The printer I purchased is really really really sexy. 1500 pounds of metal and mysterious moving parts. I took a class at AS220 on the offset press in May once I heard I would have the money, thanks to the Maharam Fellowship, to bring a press to my home town where we (myself and the arts community) could start an underground arty art rag. Think of a world that is somehow better than the one we live in and then condense that into an ink through a process of your choice and then put that on newsprint repeatedly and distribute to the masses. This is what the Dumbsaint (working title) shall be. I can’t tell you exactly what it will be because it isn’t yet. The first step was to have the idea, the next step was to find the monies, then came learning of the machine, finding the machine and now I am on to uncovering the space where the machine and all the accompanying parts will rest and await whatever it is we decide to print. Back to the pressing issue (pun intended) and that is my search for a studio.
 
AB DICK offset printing press before and after
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Before I jump into that, I would love to tell you about the press. Here it is in all its glory before and after I wrapped it in beautiful black cellophane. Yes I think it is amazing as an object just sitting in a room but especially when cloacked. I am tempted to just ship it to Telluride and let it sit in a large space with lights on it. There is something amazing about it as a potential; kind of like Christmas morning if you are into the whole Jesus birthday thing. I kind of wanted to wrap everything in that warehouse. The warehouse is in Sacramento, CA and Telluride is in southwest CO. These two locations are separated by three enormous geologic features. The Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin desert and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. 1200 miles along America’s “Lonliest Highway.” What could possibly go wrong? Nothing a little fossil fuel can’t overcome. The goal was to annhilate the time and space between myself and the press, unite and then travel back to Telluride together. Simple enough; find a car (I had one), a hitch (a friend had one that fit my car), a trailer (another friend had one) and some gas money (thank you Maharam) and the rest should take care of itself. The details uncovered after further consideration included lights for the trailer (youtube research suggested a $200 wire and a half day for install), the potential weight of the press (I wouldn’t know until I got there) vs the carrying capacity of the trailer (designed to carry an atv) and the good neighbor rule of returning everything you borrow (the trailer’s bearings would cost $200 to repack) in better shape than you found it. The logistics looked anything but easy. Not wanting to convince myself this was all a horrible idea taken way too far, I quickly hopped in the car with not much besides a hitch. Maybe I would buy a trailer when I got there? Maybe I would rent a uhaul trailer, maybe I would drive it to the middle of the desert and leave it for the vultures. Anything was possible and this felt like the right way to begin.
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Long story and many miles cut very short … there was no way my car could pull the press back to Colorado at the speeds I demanded. The good news is that there was no way any shipping company would pick it up unless I had been there to take off all the little nobby things, load up the excess parts into my car and bolt the monster to an oversized pallet. I wrestled that beast for six hours getting it ready for shipment and managed to loose only a few fresh layers of skin from my knuckles that had recently been exfoliated by that little bike accident I mentioned in the last post. Blood was spilt again! LIke a champaign bottle across the bow there are now drops of red on the offset.  
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So now I am back in Telluride looking under every rock for a place to have this press delivered. I am working with Telluride Arts, the internship, to locate space for not only myself but other artists in similar situations. I have met with the town about a few under used public biuldings as well as every commercial property owner and broker in town. I am not saying it is dire but I am currently pricing out building a subfloor in a friends dirt floor basement and looking into the medical draw backs of prolonged exposure to radon (an imperceptable form of radiation that creeps up through the ground) and offset printing inks. A lovely combo when considering martyrdom for the arts. 
 
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So stay tuned as I look for the space to make the arts. Also I will be putting on another party in the Transfer Space I spoke of in the first blog to raise more money in late August for the future maker spaces. First round was 20k … curious if we can do it again? Again and again until we have just enough to secure a permeant space free from radon and rodents for beastly offset presses and other art making machines. 
14
Jul

Home – Drew Ludwig ’15Photo

Accidents suck. Accidents suck even more when they involve your face and pavement. This is a little story about my return home at a high rate of locomotion.
 
I was looking to hit the ground running. This was three weeks ago and the day was perfect. I was home which already put the day in a positive direction and the clouds were out wearing their fluffy cumulus attire. The sun was low in the sky, and I had just woken up in my tipi near Colorado’s largest waterfall. It sounds whimsical because it is around here. Its silly gorgeous and it only got prettier during my time in Rhode Island. Not that Providence doesn’t have its charm, but I am a mountain boy and there is far too little open space or anything mountainous to look up to in the ocean state to keep me from here. We all have a place we call home so imagine your happy spot where you just want to put your hands in the soil and Telluride, CO is that place for me. Yours I imagine is amazing too and please feel free to describe in the comments below.
View from tipi deck the evening before fateful crash:
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So there I was on my bike pointed towards town with not much on my mind beyond a contented curiosity about the name of the wild flower I had just passed when my bike tire froze and bucked me off. It was cinematic. It was traumatic. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an equal or greater force or at least this is what wikipedia has to say on the matter. The greater force in this case was friction and the oppositional parties included most of my body (hands/face/knees/elbows but mostly my left pinky) and the road.
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I was heading to town to start something. The reason you are reading this blog post was my target; the Maharam Fellowship and it was my first day on the job at our local arts non-profit, Telluride Arts. Side note: I do not blame you nor any interested parties for my fate as it was I who found it more fun to not use my handle bars and it was I who had forgotten to attach the coaster break to the frame of the bike. You reap what you sew and consequence is something I have been courting for years. Granted, I am usually on the lucky side of chance, but that day found me crumpled and looking to bath in a pool of triple antibiotic ointment. I lost a little skin and some momentum but three weeks later I am well on my way to a full range of motion in the hands and the scar on my face looks like a shark, so I have that going for me.
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But why am I telling you all of this? I have no idea, but lets just say that if you don’t have your health you don’t have much of anything. First health then space to grow. Literal space. Multiple squares of feet of it. You have to have the room to be healthy, to practice your art, to eat dinner with your family and to just be. Telluride, my home town, and where I was speeding that morning, has an abundance of space but its outside our town limits. National forest, BLM lands and all sorts of privately owned reserves surround our town of 3 thousand. These great expanses are the Great Nothing Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 9.58.30 PM Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 9.53.30 PM
that drew all of us here in the first place. The mountains have a gravity and we feel this pull every moment of every day. It even finds its way to our dreams. You may think of this as homesickness but its deeper than that. Its like if Homesickness met Romantic Longing and they had a love child named Home. And imagine if Home weighed 9lbs 6oz with a full head of hair. So what is one to do if you love open space, need room to grow but don’t have the means to find a pot big enough for your roots?
I think it is important to jump in here and touch on the subject of wealth disparity. Telluride is a resort town. People from all over the country and world treat this place as an investment. A safe place to visit their valuables (property). Their money is made elsewhere in amorphous, non substantive places called “markets” and our town lots have become their safety deposit boxes. They prefer to view their valuables around the holidays and over the fourth of July holiday. FREEDOM! We have defenses against these liberties and they are the first wave of locals who felt the pull of this valley thirty years ago and stayed long enough to raise their family, grow some gray hairs and generally make this town an amazing place to live. They may have done too good of a job as this place is far to good for the general public. They still hold some of the keys to this place, but they are selling out and leaving at an alarming rate.
We call this phenomena the demographic cliff. The moment the long time local stops quietly subsidizing the younger generation of locals through below market rents, higher than expected hourly wages and access to their storage space in the back of their undeveloped properties. They are aging and the harsh reality of the mountains is that no one wants to be here when they are 70. Its just a fact. We all will feel that pull to the mountains weaken and we most definitely will eventually wander off to the lowlands. But HOW the older generation chooses to exit will determine the character of this town for decades to come.
Ok so here we are today. My fingers are healing, my shark scar is awesome, and I need a space for my offset printer to make the art! Bad news: can’t find a space for my printer. Good news: I am working with the Telluride arts to develop a partially collapsed building in the center of town as an artist maker space. Bad news again: it will take years for this to be developed but yes this space became available by the good graces of a long time local family who held onto it for the past 40 years. Yahoo for localism! That said I wouldn’t say they are giving it to us but a buy in by the arts community is a good thing. We will be invested. Now to raise the seed capital for Art Space’s (if you don’t know about this non profit check them out here) consulting fees, architectural fees, lawyer fees and all sorts of other fees before we get to the real millions it is going to take to acquire, stabilize and then build out the space. One step at a time and there have already been thousands of jogs to get us where we are today.
My first job as intern was to make our first fundraising party fabulous. Artist tend to be good at this. This was the first time the Transfer Warehouse (the building mentioned above) had been open to the public since the roof collapsed in 1979. To learn more about this space check out this website. The party was last Friday and we spent a week cleaning, building and transforming the space into an open air bar. There was live music, dancing, wheat pasted photos and just about everyone in town. We had 700 visitors and raised 20K. All in all a great evening under the open sky. Check out the trees that have grown in the center of the space since the 80s.
Yes these were shot with a drone and yes I want to shoot down every drone I see:
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Ok so check in next post as I talk about how difficult it has been for me to find one of those maker spaces under the current environment here in Telluride. I am traveling to California this week to pick up the offset press that will produce our underground arts publication, The DUMBSAINT. Sad I do not have a place to put it when I get back next week but I have faith some space will turn up, and I am guessing it will probably be because some old time local hears from someone who heard it from someone else that there is someone looking for a space to keep this town weird and arty. Three cheers for weird and arty. Oh and three more cheers for health and space. Those are the first two things you need before you can even think about being weird and arty.