Gossamer 01, June 2024
2003 – 2024
Gossamer is a project I started in 2003 while at Parsons. I completely misunderstood the assignment, which was to bring in something other than a negative to print from.
Rifling through my bag, the only thing I found was a hairnet that was holding some other photo gear. This seamed like a stretch, but at that point I didn’t have anything to loose.
And thus Gossamer was born.
So that was 2003. Fast forward to today, June 2024. 21 mutha fucking years … Oof. Having had success with Gossamer back then, and it wasn’t called Gossamer at the time, I decided to pull the project off the shelf. Lacking access to a darkroom, I quickly settled on a flatbed scanner instead. There were some glaring observations resulting from that first scan.
In the darkroom, the photogram was composed of a white mesh topology on a black ground. Makes sense, right? The strands in the hairnet block out all light leaving only the surrounding spaces to be exposed. On a scanner you get a positive. That wasn’t all that shocking. What was shocking was the shadow cast by the hairnet.
By leaving the scanner and hairnet uncovered, the resulting image was just a muddy darkness. Maybe I’ll try to find a white hairnet, or something similar, but for now I just settled on using the lid of the scanner in the default way. This leaves me with these shadows.
I’ve managed to wipe out the shadows simply by using adjustment layers in Photoshop, but in some instances I really quite like, and accentuate, the effect.
Gossamer v Riso
At the beginning of the month I started the RISO Printing: Zines and Small Publishing course within SVA RisoLAB.
Our second assignment is to produce a single page zine. It’s an 8 page zine printed on a single 11×17″ sheet of paper, my layout being just above. The lead image up top is the poster printed on the back side of the zine.
I didn’t think too terribly hard about the subject matter, I just felt that Gossamer offered enough room to easily generate the 8 pages.
I’ve put a ton of time into this so far, and was quite pleased by the results from my first day working in the lab this last week. I’m not posting those results here as they’re not quite clean enough to share, but the goal of that first session was mostly to familiarize myself with the printers and the process. That being said, other people working in the lab that day were impressed with what I pulled off on my first time out.
Class meets again tomorrow evening. And I’ll be doing a couple other sessions in the lab later in the week. So I’m looking forward to having printed copies to distribute by this time next week.
I learned a ton Wednesday, and coming out of it I’ve put tons more time into the project. The process has been both fun and fulfilling, bringing me to rethink this being a single edition. Gossamer has enough room to experiment with to easily fill another issue.
Where it goes finally I’m not sure. I’m ecstatic for the experimentation, exploration and discovery to come.
