Screen Print Extravaganza at Jam 16 December 2016 – 15 January 2017
Exhibition of 2 old school screen printers, Jeff Ross from Seattle and Com from Bangkok. Screen printers are often unacknowledged individuals who work behind the scenes creating, designing and printing images that become the vernacular of a scene. Jeff Ross designed and printed the first Nirvana tour posters as well as many other T-shirts and posters for Sub Pop Records, during the heydey of the Grunge scene in Seattle. Com is a fashion screen printer who stays completely outside of the spotlight, exhibiting rarely, Com is the creator of the Bangkok Cockroach street art logos.
Squeegee Masters, is a showcase of their new screen print work, cannibalising and recontextualising popular culture.
COM
Born in Nakhon Sawan, lives and works in Bangkok. Thai fashion screen printer by trade who rarely exhibits. Founder of label White Cat Factory. Com, creator of the iconic ‘Warning Cockroach Area’ and the ‘Hello My Name is BKK’ cockroach images. The first of which he started using for over 11 years ago. These images have become synonymous with the streets of Bangkok, having contributed an estimated hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers around the cultural landscape of Bangkok.
“I want to make a sticker for the cockroaches, they are everywhere in Bangkok. The warning says this is his place, make people think that it’s normal, don’t be scared.” Providing an ironic counterpoint to the conventional use of signage within a city. Com further draws parallels between the anonymous and kinetic style of the street artist and the cockroach, “run, stop, run and hide – he’s smart.” On one level his work is a normalisation of what we normally consider repulsive, on another it is a challenge to the status quo, with quite broader implications.
Take from the street – give back to the street
His preferred medium of silkscreened stickers and posters is commonly used as a low budget advertising tool reserved for professional scammers and politicians. However, Com subverts this medium with a good dose of humour for artistic expression. Often screen printing his art on discarded material he finds, recycling “old stickers, posters, paper, bus tickets – everything” then putting it back out to the streets where they originally came from.
Com cites his influences from Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Basquiat, Mondrian and Salvator Dali. His series for this show is a tribute to the original ‘Trainspotting’ (1996) film which when released Com found an infinity to its depiction of ‘music, fashion, drugs, sex, (and) partying’ at the time.
Chunnual on facebook.
JEFF ROSS
Born in Würzburg, Germany, grew up in the United States, currently based in Bangkok. Taught himself how to screen print 30 years ago so he could make T-shirts for his friend’s bands in Denver who were going on tour, hand making the screens himself. 3 years later in 1989 he moved to Seattle as the grunge scene was taking off and started his own printing company, designing T-shirts and posters for Sub Pop Records; Nirvana, Mudhoney Afghan Whigs, The Fluid, Reverend Horton Heat etc. This led him to work in snowboarding industry, for K2, Ride, Snowboard Connection and many others.
After printing for 20 years in Seattle for over 500 bands and companies, Jeff decided to focus on purely his own art, also incorporating collage techniques. For the next 7 years he lived as a nomadic artist, doing suitcase art shows across the US, coast to coast, travelling from Pancevo, Serbia; Bern, Switzerland; Berlin, Germany before setting up his studio in Bangkok, Thailand 3 years ago.
JeffRossArt on facebook and Instagram.
