$3,000.00
About the print . . . this print was created with a new printmaking technique developed in our studio we are calling “chroma-collé”. We have developed a way to inkjet print (or otherwise pigment) tissue-thin Japanese Gampi paper and then chine-collé this paper to fine art French paper like Hahnemuhle Copperplate or BFK Rives de Lin. Gampi (and Mitsumata) papers that have been made for hundreds of years have the unique ability to take a full amount of inkjet ink just like coated inkjet paper without bleeding. Image resolution stays sharp and color is exquisit. In fact, for some odd reason we’ve found the gampi fibers eliminate the visible inkjet dot while maintaining all of the same sharpness that an inkjet print can hold. This is the first print-edition for sale . . . ever. It’s a piece of printmaking history.
About the project (in Christopher’s own words) . . .
Over the years I have been blessed to work on projects that speak to my heart. This is one of those projects, with this photograph being just one image from a project on the Devils of Oaxaca. Every year at the beginning of Lent, people within the state of Oaxaca, Mexico camouflage themselves as devils to scare the shit out of the real evil in the world.
They dance, they sing, everyone participates – from babies still sucking from breasts, to the elders who are so old they are farting dust. It is a primitive, beautiful, joyous, bacchanalian revelation with a lot of drinking of mezcal (as real evil scares the shit out of them, too.)
Carnival, of course, marks the beginning of Lent, and the people of Oaxaca are deeply steeped in Catholicism. Oaxaca Centro, for example, has a church on every corner – many of them dating back to the 1500’s when the Spanish first claimed the new world as their own. Former nunneries are now Airbnbs. Monasteries are now restaurants. Hospitals are run by clergy.
However, what makes this celebration utterly captivating for me is how the diverse indigenous tribes within Oaxaca assimilated Catholicism and make it their own. Yes, while most within Oaxaca consider themselves Catholics, I love how they mess with the orthodoxy of Catholicism and transform it into a joyous, free and irreverent faith, conflating it with their own beliefs and customs. They take off the straitjackets of a rigid, colorless doctrine, and don costumes during Carnival that roar with color and impiety – almost as if they are rebelling against a subjugation in the only way they can. It is, I feel, a beautiful, subversive history of “poking the man.”
And far from just costuming as devils during Carnival, men dress as women, small girls become Zapotec warriors, every village it seems has their own unique way of celebrating the beginning of Lent. So much so that now I’m not sure quite where this project is going.
All I know is I want to celebrate these beautiful people and there culture somehow, particularly given how my adopted country of the United States is currently victimizing our Latin communities. All proceeds from anything I create I plan to donate to Siembra, a nonprofit organization working to defend our Latin communities from abuse.
I look forward to the journey.
