Terran Last Gun and printmaker Mitchell Marti debut five collaborative lithographs that translate ledger art into print, pairing hand-drawn detail with lithographed ledger sheets.
Terran Last Gun has collaborated with printmaker Mitchell Marti of Interbang Press on five new lithographs and, as far as we know, no one has translated ledger art into lithography before. The ledger sheet beneath each print was itself made with lithography, nearly indistinguishable from an antique sheet down to the handwritten accounts and the lines bleeding through from the back.
“When Mitchell proposed this collaboration to me, it was an immediate yes,” says gallery owner Frank Rose. “When we first started working with Terran, his work was essentially all screenprints. His practice has shifted into primarily ledger drawing and it is brilliant to come back to print media, while expressing much of the complexity of ledger work.”
Marti had been watching for years. “Working as a collaborative printer, it is seldom that I get the opportunity to work with someone like Terran Last Gun, for whom printmaking is their primary visual language,” he writes. The ledger drawings, which “place opaque fields of color next to translucent ones, warm hues next to cool,” raised the question of how Last Gun might bridge them with his print work. Marti’s answer was lithography, which “lends itself to both really fine lines and geometric flat shapes, as well as handling the subtle color shifts needed.” They landed on chine collé, collaging thin washi that resembles ledger paper onto heavy cotton rag, with text printed on both sides so a little ink leaks through.
Last Gun singles this out: “It’s incredible how Mitchell was able to make printmaking paper look like an actual ledger sheet, he even printed the ledger lines and writing on the back side of the paper. It’s the little details that make these lithographs so excitingly fresh and intriguing.”
It was his first lithograph and his first collaboration with a collaborative printmaker. “By the end of the project my work had evolved into something entirely new and unexpected,” he says. “It’s a record of a record. Whether it’s antique ledger sheets, archival printmaking paper, cliff walls, or bison hides, recording on various objects and nature has always been an innate trait of humanity.”
All the prints feature the square, a shape Last Gun treats as “a container, a foundation, and an entry point,” and he describes the results as “fragments of human imagination, and the moods they create are activated by their color combinations.”
Complex Wonder to Gaze Upon, the largest work, runs twenty-seven colors across five sheets at twenty by fifty-three inches. “It is true to its title,” Rose says. “The amount of labor and technical understanding needed to create a piece like this is mind-blowing. Seeing Terran’s vision executed this way merges into the spirit of the title, that of awe and wonder. Whether that’s for the natural world, the resiliency of one’s culture, or mastery of a craft, these works contain all these ideas.”
Marti describes the collaboration as “filled with good conversations that turned into intriguing technical challenges,” and says its ending “has the distinct feeling of a beginning.”
View the series, available now at Hecho a Mano.
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