Printed Matter presents A Mistake Is A Beautiful Thing, an exhibition from LA-based Coloured Publishing. The installation overviews the publishing output of the press, while considering the nature of a collaborative creative process – how mistakes resulting from an artist and designer working together inform and influence the path to an end product. Please join us for an opening reception with the artists on Friday, March 16, 6–8PM. Join the event on facebook here.

Since 2015, Coloured Publishing – a joint project from artist Devin Troy Strother and designer Yuri Ogita – has steadily produced dozens of editioned works, including artists’ books, zines, loose-leaf publications, prints, t-shirts and buttons. Publishing outside institutional standards, the press aims to share ideas about an eclectic range of topics with full autonomy – being people of color in the US, celebrating underappreciated cultural phenomena, and publishing works by their fellow artists.

Alongside a display of in-print and archival works, A Mistake Is A Beautiful Thing debuts several newly created zines (Breakdancing With Scissors In Your Pocket, Apple Bag Contemporary, and others), as well as new T-shirts produced on occasion of the exhibition. The show also puts on view upwards of 250 digital offset prints – each of them distinct, many brand new – wrapping around the walls of the Printed Matter Project Room.

These digitally-made collage works speak to aspects of Coloured Publishing’s broader practice and aesthetic, pulling from a range of influences. Often reworking found/internet-sourced imagery and cultural iconography, the works are built up with abstract markings and elements of Strother’s own studio work. Frequently overwritten by short text pieces, the prints are nuanced, energetically-paced and frequently tuned-in to a mode of vernacular storytelling that is both comedic and incisive.

View PDF of all available prints here. To purchase a print not shown on table above email sales@printedmatter.org

In Summer 2018 Printed Matter will publish a new artists’ book with Coloured Publishing, A Mistake Is A Beautiful Thing.