Rubber Factory Posters

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At Home with Nancy Burson

RFP When we first spoke about this image, Blue Marble Simulacrum, you brought up the Mayan history to this pigment.

NB The Mayans would use blue paint to completely cover their victims before they sacrificed them. Then they’d kill them and throw them down a well [editor’s note: in fact, it was a natural sinkhole known as the Sacred Cenote]. It was very violent. The well was found about a decade ago and there was a lot of blue paint [in a layer that was 14 feet deep] and a lot of bones. What’s interesting about the Mayan blue is that it survived better than any other color used in the Mayan ceramics. Scientists never figured out why the blue is as vivid and long lasting. They know that it was apparently forged at a higher heat than a fire, and they never figured out how the heat got so hot. It’s the mystery and miraculous quality of why it’s endured that’s interesting to me.

It’s such a cool color, in terms of temperature. What I find so fascinating about that Mayan history is that... I assumed that in all cultures that violence or pain or suffering was represented by the color red, as well as love, of course. It seems that for the Mayans, blue was more representative of that. Is that right?

NB Yes. From my point of view, over the years, what I learned was that, green is supposed to be healing, red is supposed to be action and energy, and blue is supposed to be calming. But there are exceptions.  

So why do you think the Mayans used blue to paint their victims?

NB Chac, their rain god was portrayed as blue, and he was the overseer responsible for human sacrifice. So perhaps the coating of blue paint on their victims was what they felt to be the most appealing to Chac.

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Something Soft & Launched

On December 21st, we held a soft launch of our first batch of 8 posters at Rubber Factory. We wanted to show what our posters would look like: their scale, format, price and the general approach to our poster company. The thing is, this is idea is a little bit radical in the contemporary art market.

There's plenty of ways to buy prints, both in galleries and online spaces, but they pretty much remain financially unattainable to a general audience, especially with the economy of our day. 

With photography, making multiples is a core part of the medium. So why not take it on with something approachable? We publish posters, not prints, and we affirm that by emblazoning the front of each poster with the artist's name, the work's title, date and the logo of our company. We're proud to say they're made in the USA with the finest large-format digital printing there is for the medium, so we definitely won't fold them.

There's text on the back of each poster, too. The artist has a hand in the production of that. The poster shows the artist in a light they can be proud of and with an image you will love to have in your space.

We held this soft launch at Rubber Factory, the contemporary photography gallery located at 29c Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side of New York City. It coincided with the exhibition of Clemens Fantur's Aurora Cordial, a body of work on the subject of memory and The Philippines. The black pool at the center of the main space was a core element of that exhibit.

The artists selected for this first batch are all brilliant emerging artists that we wanted to support: Suzanna Zak, Carlos Jaramillo, Mo Costello, Brian H. Merriam, Roxana Azar, Brenda Biondo and Yael Malka. They're available online now and we will be publishing many more artists in regular batches every few months. We just have to get the ball rolling first!

Thanks to everyone who came out for the event! What a great night it was. Sign up for our newsletter to find out about our upcoming events.