These past months have marked a new chapter for the organization, a transition both physically into our new facility and conceptually as we unite our operations and recommit to the vision of Powerhouse as a hive for creative expression. I’ve continued my exploration and interest in the definition of “fabrication.” Given the chance to speak with Dennis Hrehowsik, a Master Printer with Powerhouse, I posed the questions: What was your journey to art? What does art fabrication mean to you? Where across the creative process is credit owed?
Dennis studied Art History and Graphic Design and became involved in the field of print firstly as a salesman. He sold antique Audubon bird prints with galleries while a pupil of graphic design at Parsons.
In the wake of 9/11, he moved on to a position selling paintings at Axelle Fine Arts, a fine art screen printing business run by our current Director of Print Luther Davis. At that time, there were professionals in the screen printing business still drawing transparencies by hand — a process that has since moved to digital with tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Dennis applied his knowledge of the Adobe Suite to his role as apprentice in the screen printing shop. It’s been 20 years since Dennis began working at Axelle, the print shop that today constitutes the Powerhouse Arts printshop.
How do you define fabrication? Or printmaking fabrication?
Dennis posits that the fabricator should be considered as the engineer rather than the architect. The fabricator offers technical knowledge necessary to realize someone else’s dream. As a fabricator, he is process-oriented and enjoys making images, a role that allows him to focus on the craft and not the content of the work. The content is provided by the client.
Is there a specific process of screen printing that you enjoy?
Dennis enjoys looking at the images presented before him as a kind of puzzle. He begins by doing a color count. He considers the order of the colors, how to create images in the fewest colors possible, and how many colors are possibly by ‘cheating’ or overlapping tones using secondary and tertiary colors. Throughout the process, it is important to go from light to dark with benchmarks along the way. This ensures balance and a desired color-range. If the project is modest — utilizing ten to a dozen colors — he relies on his own memory, but when it comes to a project with a higher color count, he maps out the colors. For at least a month, he thinks about the layers and the image because it becomes cost intensive once he gets to the press. Ultimately, most of the labor is done by the time he starts to make the prints.
When Dennis is separating colors he’s creating one image per color. Every color you see on a screen print is a separate screen, a separate film, a separate hand-mixed color, and a separate run of the press. If there’s a 60 color print that means each of those steps was performed 60 times. In offering a quote to the client, printers speculate on the amount of colors that can be achieved as a combination or derivative. This often allows for a more conservative budget than what the client originally expected, in the best case scenario saving clients possibly thousands of dollars. The intention is to give a good faith estimate on the scope of work. If the fabricators make a mistake with an extra color, the shop absorbs the cost. Because the scope of many projects is quite large, the shops need to be both creative and conservative in their techniques to achieve quality within an optimal budget.
Once the colors are separated, a process called chroming, Dennis prints the transparencies for each of those colors, which requires planning and attention to detail because the printmakers are redrawing or repainting every image. This requires familiarity with the artist’s process and palette and ultimately determines how Dennis mixes colors. He adapts print processes to how each individual artist works making the print look more faithful to the artist’s work.
At the print shop there exists significant cross collaboration within the shop and beyond, though projects are best led and managed with a singular printmaker. This ensures accuracy and efficiency. The “pre-press” (the making of the films and separations) process tends to be smoother with one person taking the lead. Everything beyond this stage is collaborative from the making of the screen, to the mixing of the inks, to the printing. It’s always important that the processes are consistent so that the results are reproducible. The shop is set up in such a way that once the films are printed, any team member can feasibly pick them up and achieve the same high quality result.
Crediting Fabricators
As a fabricator, Dennis is happy to play the role of realizing an artist’s vision but does advocate for transparency and due credit. There still exists a desire in some cases for the fabrication process to be “invisible” and for the artwork to be considered solely the expression of the hand of the artist. In normalizing appropriate crediting, Dennis considers that perhaps credit may not be given personally but should at least be granted to the fabrication entity or organization with whom the artist collaborated.
There are external factors to consider, too. Often an emerging artist or an artist who has yet to achieve commercial success may be less forthcoming about outside collaboration. Once some level of commercial success is achieved, they may in turn seek to nurture the hands that helped nurture their work. As a fabricator, he is sensitive to the stressors of the market and accommodates the artist’s wishes.
When it comes to fabrication, there’s value in having a community come together to create something new. Further, there’s been a recent push for transparency across arts labor practices and the expansion of the definition of “artist” from that of a singular artist-as-genius to a definition that reflects the symbiotic ecosystem that is the arts economy. These ongoing conversations with our Fabrication department call into question the idea of the canon. At what point do we diverge from the idea of the archetypal “artist” to something more democratic, to a state where many voices, sources, and contributors are granted visibility and credit. Might there be a time when groups of individuals are applauded for their collaborative work rather than having a singular artist deified for their vision? For now, it appears, the approach is determined on a case by case basis.
