On the other side of downtown LA, in the loft area of the city often referred to as the Arts District, Hard Pressed Studios presents yet another aspect of printmaking and a striking contrast both in terms of process, style and ownership.
Hard Pressed
Studios is a relatively new press, founded five years ago by artist and masterprinter
Karen Fiorito. Karen, like so many others in LA, made a slow migration from the
East coast towards the west coast with a long pause as she completed her MFA in
printmaking at Arizona State University. It was there that her work flourished
into its present politically driven form and as she completed her thesis
research she began making contacts with like-minded artists in LA.
Her move to LA was speared on by Robbie
Conal and John Carr both of whom have now collaborated extensively with Karen.
As a political artist herself, she was drawn to the quick nature and relatively
low cost of process color screen printing for images to be postered and pasted
up. And as a masterprinter Karen now seems to walk the lines between the world
of street art and fine art printing, as she masterfully hand prints extremely
detailed and exacting high quality works for artists like Conal, Shephard
Fairey and Mear One.
Artists who
grativate to her for the hand-printed quality of her process, her fluency in
screen printing and her ability to handle special materials such as glitter,
flocking and metallics without sacrificing quality. The image here is one of
Robbie Conal’s musicians’ triptych that Karen printed.
And it is not by chance Karen has and continues to work with such
artists (here Dwellone’s Peace 47) but rather it reflects her philosophy on
printmaking as a whole. In her own
words, “I choose to work with mostly political artists because I believe
that the true nature of printmaking is to take the means of production out of
the hands of the corporations (or the ruling class) and put it back in the
hands of artists. It has taken me a while to come to that realization, but I
believe that is what first attracted me to the medium: in printmaking, the
medium is the message.”
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