Zine of the ‘Week’ #7
Papermasse

THITH: How long have you been publishing and how did you start?

Kirsten McCrea: I got the idea when I was working in a restaurant that had beautiful prints on the walls that were $2000 each. They were stunning, but I can’t even foresee a future where I’ll be able to drop that kind of cash on artwork. I have a lot of friends who are in the same boat – people who love and appreciate contemporary art but can’t afford original work. I started thinking that maybe if I removed the person from the equation and made prints using a machine, that I could lower the price. I looked into it and discovered that that’s exactly what Sheppard Fairy does: he releases an offset lithograph print every month. They sell for $45 each, which I think is still too steep. I settled on 5 bucks as the going rate for my prints.
Papirmasse debuted at the Royal Bison craft fair in Edmonton, Alberta in early December 2008. I’d only had the idea for a couple weeks, but I liked the idea of doing a yearly run that would start in January and didn’t want to wait a whole year to get started.

For our first issue, I took a photo of one of my paintings, called a printshop, and a few days later had a stack of 1,000 prints sitting in my living room.

THITH: How do you fund it and how do you distribute it?

KM: When I moved back to Montreal in early 2009 Papirmasse moved with me. At the end of the first year I put the project on pause, because funding was an issue. I was making massive quantities of prints and wanted to find a way to restructure the project so that I wouldn’t be left with excess stock every month.

Then in 2010 I teamed up with the fabulous Maison Kasini, a gallery and small publishing company in Montreal. They have an in-house printshop and had the fantastic idea that we make the switch from offset printing to digital printing. This allows us to print on demand (which basically means that we never make a print until a subscription has been sold, so there is no waste and no extra cost). This change means that Papirmasse really can’t lose money, so we’re going to be around for a loooong time! They handle the distribution too, which basically involves stuffing hundreds of envelopes every month and carting them down to good old Canada Post.

THITH: Is it a labour of love? What else are you working on?

Ha ha, yes. No one is getting rich off $5 prints. But I am very happy to be filling the world with more art in my own small way.

I am also a painter and a free-lance illustrator. Right now I’m working on a series of giant 7-foot tall atom bomb explosion paintings that are patterned and highly decorative.

I guess for a few years my artwork has been focused on the way we construct mythologies around political events. Nuclear proliferation ends up coming across in the news almost like a wild west story or a soap opera, with good guys and bad guys and elaborate explanations for why the good guys get to have weapons and the bad guys don’t. It takes focus away from the fact that no one should be in possession of something so destructive.

I also do a lot of collaborative art-making with two collectives here in Montreal. Cease (www.cease.it) puts on art parties and makes collaborative wheatpaste murals, and En Masse (www.enmasse.info) paints large-scale collaborative black and white murals with anywhere from 4 to 40 artists. I don’t know if there’s something in our foul water here in Montreal or if collaborative stuff is happening everywhere these days… Either way, I feel lucky to be a part of both groups, because it’s liberating to make something that doesn’t belong to you afterwards, and it’s always really inspiring to work alongside such talented people.

THITH: Who are your collaborators?

KM: I work with Chris and Ric from Maison Kasini (www.maisonkasini.com) to produce the prints.

Every month we feature the work of a different artist and writer, so the list of collaboraters has gotten pretty long. So far in 2011 we have worked with Jeff Kulak, Guillaume Morrissette, JP King, Alan Ganev, Matt Hovey, Stephen Schaub, Robert Yune, David Orfé, and Johnny Forever. Some of our contributors are both artists and writers and have tackled both sides of an issue.

THITH: What are your goals for Papermasse?

KM: We are really excited right now because we just hit our year-end goal of 300 subscribers. We’ve now upped the goal to 500 subscribers, which I feel really confident will happen. The more people we get the more we can take on ambitious projects (like making a small book for an issue, or making a really huge print). It’s pretty awesome too because a lot of our subscribers are in far-away places like Malaysia and Switzerland, and it’s exciting knowing that the work of our artists is travelling so far.

THITH: Can anyone submit their art or writing for publication?

KM: We will open our next call to artists and writers in late 2011, so anyone who is interested should join our mailing list or fan us on Facebook so that they hear about it!

More HERE.

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