episode thirty-eight | martin mazorra

Published 8 April 2020

Miranda Metcalf  Hello print friends, and welcome to the 38th episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend), the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. Oh, my dear quarantinarinos far and wide, I do hope that you're keeping safe and well, and I'm very happy to be back with another week of print chats. Chats brought to you by the Pine Copper Lime Patreon supporters. As always, thanks so much to all of you, and particularly those who have joined up in recent weeks. We're deep within the most uncertain times, and your support means so much right now. And if by chance anyone out there listening has found themselves staring at their walls a little bit more than usual, and maybe even longing for some new art, helloprintfriend.com has a print gallery with a beautiful selection of artists from all over Southeast Asia. There's a link to our Patreon and our online print gallery in the show notes. Printmaking forever, shun the non believers, join the party... at 1.8 meters. My guest this week is Martin Mazorra, a well known and well loved printmaker based in Brooklyn, but originally from West Virginia, which, luckily for me, means he's blessed with a fantastic voice for radio. Martin makes stunning woodcuts, often paired with letterpress movable type, which he uses to create his own iconographic systems which are as beautiful as they are darkly humorous. He is also exceptionally cool, which makes me feel a little bit like an awkward nerd from the AV radio club during our interview, so I'm sure you'll enjoy hearing that as well. This is another interview I recorded in the pre-Corona world, so at the end, you'll hear Martin list the exhibitions that he's looking forward to participating in and creating work for. And again, just like last week, I left all of that in. I want us to remember that exhibitions are going to be rescheduled, galleries will open up again, the work we do will find its audience. We will meet again. And in the meantime, I hope these episodes help that distance feel a little smaller. So sit back, relax, and prepare to be cool as a cucumber with Martin Mazorra. (What do you mean that's not cool? That is totally a cool thing to say. That is what cool people say!) Hi, Martin. How's it going?

Martin Mazorra  Hello, how are you? I'm doing well.

Miranda Metcalf  Very good, very good. Well, I know you really sort of just by reputation and from seeing your work online and seeing representations of Cannonball Press at various conferences. I always like to ask my guests to introduce themselves a little bit and kind of just let people know who are unfamiliar the questions of who you are, where you are, and what you do.

Martin Mazorra  My name is Martin Mazorra. I am currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. I have been making prints in New York and teaching printmaking in New York for over 20 years. I have a letterpress studio, a collection of wood type and antique letterpresses, that I've collected and maintained for a number of years. I am a print centric artist, and specifically relief, woodcut and letterpress. I've been making everything from small business cards to large format mural size wheat pastes and sewn prints, I've done some sculpture from prints, stuff like inflatables and cardboard sculptures with wheat paste prints on the outside of it. Yeah, currently I'm working on a large format project of all new work for a show in Austin, Texas. I think that kind of sums it up.

Miranda Metcalf  And so sort of all the different hats you wear, would you say you're artist and teacher and letterpress conservator? Is that kind of the many different things that you do?

Martin Mazorra  Yeah, letterpress conservator. Yeah. I publish prints as well, as Cannonball Press. So I function as a publisher. So I seek out other artists, I'm constantly looking at other artists that have a similar aesthetic to the Cannonball Press aesthetic. I produce a $20 black and white woodcut, that's been a kind of a staple or cornerstone of a lot of the things that I do. Yeah. I mean, letterpress enthusiast, conservator, advocate, general con man.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Well, where did you grow up, and wrote role did art play in that time in your life?

Martin Mazorra  I'm originally from West Virginia. I spent the first 21 years living in West Virginia. I studied art in middle school and in high school, and then went to the University and studied at the West Virginia University. I studied art. I never had much outside training other than the bits of art classes I had in high school. And when I got to the university I studied painting and drawing. I thought that I wanted to be a painter, and I still really enjoy that. But I think that when I discovered print and I discovered the multiple and kind of the accessibility of it, also the democratic history of it, that really spoke to me. And I think that it wasn't until... I would say it was probably about four or five years after I had those experiences, early on formative experiences, and I'd spent some time painting and working in New York as a printer, but also trying to promote myself as a painter, that I kind of really fell in love with the philosophy of making accessible and affordable art. And I think that a lot of that camp comes from growing up in West Virginia and steeped in kind of populist culture. But also, at the time that I was growing up in high school and junior high, and was making art in college, too, we had like an all ages club that was there. And we had a lot of bands that would come through, and there was the kind of DIY aesthetic and ethos that became kind of formative with a lot of us. And I kind of carried that over into my art practice with the formation of Cannonball Press, and that kind of model of doing it yourself and producing your own and your friends' work and putting it out there.

Miranda Metcalf  So it was in college then that you discovered printmaking? Did you just find a printmaking course and discover that you enjoyed it?

Martin Mazorra  The printmaking program at West Virginia University, now that I look back on it and learn a little bit more about it, there was always kind of a history of that university having a print program. When I was there, in terms of the 2D work that was going on there, I think that it was very progressive in what now I think people [call] interdisciplinary, cross disciplinary, but the sphere of influence of print kind of affected a lot of the making that was going on there. And the artists that were teaching in that were very informative, but then you also had the culture within the studio. And there were a lot of graduate students that were coming to study printmaking there. And they worked in the laboratory with the underclassmen. And so you had that kind of exchange that happens in a print studio. And that was also, that social aspect of it, it spoke to me in the way I think that it does to a lot of people, especially when you are kind of socialized having grown up and had that social shared experience of, like, listening to music with other people. You know, you're comfortable kind of being in a room with other people doing your own thing, sharing a common appreciation for what's going on around you. I feel like it was kind of a natural progression into that. And so you had that shared experience. And it was also a very strong program at the time, as it is now.

Miranda Metcalf  So it sounds like West Virginia had a really, as you're saying, it has a really strong print program then [as it does] now, but you didn't necessarily know about that when you went to school there. It was something you discovered once you'd arrived and started to engage with it?

Martin Mazorra  Right. I went to West Virginia University, that was my only option. And I'm fortunate to have had that opportunity. And so I once I got out, I went to graduate school at the American University in Washington, D.C. And I went there to study painting. And while I was there, I think I ended up working with the printmaker that was adjunct professor there and spent time in the studio there, and I took a course through consortium of schools at George Washington. And I studied printmaking there. And I think that was one of the things, too, is that you walked into that environment and you had a shared experience and a shared understanding of a particular process. And I think that you had conversation that you could start with people too. So it's like, you understood the process, this is how we do things here, how do you do things there, that kind of thing. And there were those moments to enter into it. And so, when I came to New York and I needed work, I was very fortunate enough to have a visiting artist that was working on a lithograph with Andrew Mockler at Jungle Press here in New York. And she introduced me to Andrew, and I worked for him for five years, four or five years, I worked for Andrew. And he was extremely generous with his time with me, I got to meet a lot of different artists in New York. So I saw a different side of the print world, like a professional side of it outside of an academic studio. I worked in that environment for a long time. And at that point, I think I was still making paintings and stuff. But it was a way of engaging with the community in New York. I also went - this was before I started Cannonball, too - I went and made prints in some of the open access print studios in Manhattan Graphics. I went there to access screenprinting, which I had never done before, they didn't have that when I was in West Virginia. And so I was making mostly lithographs and etchings and stuff, and relief prints, but I hadn't ever done screenprinting. So I basically took an introductory class and then just went there, would use the facility. I didn't have a studio either. So that became kind of my default place to go work.

Miranda Metcalf  So where did letterpress come into your life? And how did it end up kind of taking over and now being such a big part of what you do and your ethos?

Martin Mazorra  I think that letterpress kind of came into it at the time that I was working for Jungle Press, around '99 or something like that. I was walking down West Broadway on a Saturday, I probably had gone into the shop to work on my own stuff or clean up from Friday when it was just, you know, whatever. So I was walking through West Broadway, and I met Kevin Bradley. He was selling prints, on the street, of Yee-Haw Press. He and Julie were selling prints, they were up from Knoxville, Tennessee. And so I'm walking down the street, and you know, you see all that other stuff, and then all of a sudden you see that thing that's handprinted. And you see that type. And all the handcarved type that they were doing at the time, and all the color, and it was artwork that people were making about stuff that I was into. They were making music posters, and those letterforms, and all that stuff. And so then I saw that, and that really, I think that spoke to me in a way. There was a connection for me to a lot of the things that I had really found formative. And here were people doing it. And it looked like they were having a good time doing it. And it's graphic. I think that one of the things that, in thinking about forming Cannonball Press, was that at the time that I was doing that, people were trying to build web pages and stuff like that. And you would see... the color profile and the space, you know, the format was so small and so low res and took forever to load. And I was like, man, if you just built that, if it was just black and white, and it was really low [res], you know what I mean? Like you could totally tell what it was, just big bold graphics, that would load so much faster. And you would totally get a what you see is what you're going to get kind of thing, you know? Whereas like subtle, nuanced color prints, it was kind of hard to tell. Because I worked on those, and I would see them online, or I'd see them printed - because then people still printed postcards and stuff - and you'd be like, man, that just doesn't cut it. There was a lot at that time, too. So those cats, and then Bill Fick was in New York at that time. Bill would have postcards, and he did these mailings. And so you would get these postcards in the mail from Bill Fick and I had him on the refrigerator for years, man. I got on his mailing list through SGC or something, and you would get those things in the mail. And that was always fun. So there's a lot of things like that. And then I think maybe a couple years after that, I bought some prints from Julian Kevin that I still have, and it had to have been - because I have a big double aught, like it was like a calendar for the new millennia. And then I started teaching, I think, at Parsons in the fall of 2000. And there was a letterpress at Parsons that was underneath this tarp, like the Frankenstein monster, kind of hanging out underneath there. And nobody was using it, right. But there was that Frankenstein monster hanging out. And I had never touched one, I'd never fooled with it, and there was all the wood type that was there. But it was under lock and key, thank God, because otherwise those kids would have all stole their initials out of it. And so there were different people, there was this cat John Ross, that wrote The Complete Printmaker. So John was there. And he was teaching a continuing education class. And every once in a while, I'd be poking around in there, and I would see people making stuff on it. And I kind of figured it out, it was like, 'Okay, that's where that goes, that's where that goes.' And then you'd go in, and nobody was using it. You'd just dogpile some stuff until you figured it out. But I never really had anybody show me how to do it. I just kind of messed with it until I got it right. I didn't even really get it right. I think I just messed with it until I got some ink on paper, and I was like, 'I'm a letterpress printer!' Yeah, sorry, trained letterpress people of the world. But yeah, that was kind of the story with that, and there was type in there. And it was fonted out in different sizes and different weights. And I just started messing with it. And really, I had no typographical background, like none, you know what I mean? And there were graphic designers at that school, really competent type designers, and book designers, and layout designers that were teaching in that. And people would come through and talk to me about how awful my kerning was, you know what I mean? And I was like, 'What? Those are fighting words.' But no, I was just a sponge at that point. And so you're like, 'Alright, cool, I don't know what I'm doing.' When I teach it now, I can see what everybody wants to do with that. Everybody wants to make alphabet soup when they first get on letterpress, and it's like, 'Alright, let's just do that the first day. Now that you've done that, let's learn how to do this.'

Miranda Metcalf  What do you mean by alphabet soup?

Martin Mazorra  You just take a whole bunch of different letterforms from different sets of type. And I call that hillbilly teeth. It's just like mismatched, and there's no baseline. It's beautiful. But once you do that once, man, you know? It's like, all right, there you go. Some people quit right there, they've satisfied their whole thing. A lot of kids, all they want to do is learn how to screenprint a t-shirt, man. Show them how to screenprint and they just move on. Scratch that itch. Anyway, so you do that, and then you figure out how to do it better. And luckily I never had to do any kind of commercial work with it, because I would spend hours and hours doing those initial lockups. Because I wasn't measuring anything. I mean, it's... use your line gauges, kids. Yeah, I wasn't measuring anything. I was just jamming shit in there to see if I could get it to print. And I mean, I did, but eventually you wanted to do certain things, and by just challenging yourself and the desire to do different stuff, I guess I figured out a little bit more, you know? I still feel like there's so much I could do, it has a lot of rich possibility. And there's a resistance to it that I really find, and like a puzzle making curiosity, that I find really interesting.

Miranda Metcalf  So your interest in letter type and that process, was that when words sort of began to appear in your work or were introduced? Or were you playing with that balance between picture and text before this?

Martin Mazorra  I think that I had been introducing images with text a little bit before that. When I was working with Cannonball, my collaborator at the time, Mike Houston, he and I were both really interested in comics - I think more him than me, he had a deeper understanding of that. It became interesting to be able to pair stuff with text and have that layer of meaning incorporated into it. And I think that in terms of formative image making, I think that I was always interested in... I guess the codification of imagery, and the associations that people would have with particular images. And I think that being able to lay that extra layer inside of there, it was interesting to me. I worked with a lot of abstract painters when I was in graduate school that were painting shapes, and then they would talk about philosophers. Like, okay, cool. I mean, I guess I get it, I probably don't get it, you know, I definitely don't, I'm not gonna lie. I don't get that aspect of it. And it was really reductive at that point too. So you're like really reducing. And then there was a point where it's just like, you could put everything back in, and maybe overstep it. I think I was interested in a balance. So it's like, you know, I'm joking about the aesthetic of certain artists. But in some ways, it's like when you found people that had that really beautiful balance in their work. You know, that was what I think I wanted. And so maybe, maybe I will eventually figure it out. But I think being able to add type into it was a way of fulfilling certain things that I don't think that maybe the pictures weren't able to do. So it was like a balance between those things.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, when you were talking about playing with the associations that people have with particular images, is that a bit how you kind of came to using an aesthetic that feels a bit vintage, or like almost Victorian, like you'll use these hands with cuffs and that kind of thing. And then you'll add words to it. And the play between the two feels old and new, they're there at the same time, is that kind of how you came to it? Is because you just sort of draw on that cache of association that people already have?

Martin Mazorra  I think that I look to those, like I reference that stuff a lot. I mean, all of that Victorian  chromalithography, all that stuff is just gorgeous, man. It's just like, it's beautiful stuff. And valentines, all those early - even the ones from mid century were great. And the sentiment behind that, you know, a picture and a little bit of text, was always really wonderful. I don't know how or why. I mean, I think there's a directness to all that stuff. And a vernacular to commercial printing that I really, at that particular point in time, that I think is really nice to be able to reference it. I think that I kind of arrived at that codification through an interest in associative imagery. There were these dream books that you could get at the deli to tell you what lottery numbers to pick, so like, if you had a dream about a black dog, it meant that you should play a certain number. But they would also be able to tell you that you were going to fall in and out of love, or you know, you might step in a puddle or break your ankle or something. I don't know. You know what I mean? Like there was a divination from associative imagery as well. And I just thought that stuff was super fantastic. That if you could build your own lexicon of stuff and have it mean something, I think that in the way that you would look at and talk about European, or even non European art, when you would see a whole lexicon of images in Indian miniatures. I don't know what the hell that's about. But you know what it means, like, you could sit there and build on it, you can see that particular character played out in a number of vignettes and be like, 'Alright, I can kind of get a sense of what's going on here.' You know? I think that like being able to build that for myself was interesting, with the flowers.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I was definitely thinking of your flowers as you were talking, if you want to speak to that series.

Martin Mazorra  Yeah. I mean, I think I started that about six or seven years ago as a means to start making some color work, because I had made, for like 14 years, I'd made just black and white woodcuts. So just to start making pictures again in that way. And it was a subject that seemed really rich, in terms of it. And then I think I maybe had heard of the language of flowers, but then when I was working on that, I obviously researched those floral dictionaries. And you know, it's all made up, which is awesome. I mean - sorry, floriographers! They're super fantastical, which is like, really wonderful. And then you see that there was floriography in Shakespeare, he had a whole bunch of associated meaning, and all that... herbalists, and all that stuff. It's just super rich, right? I don't claim to know all that stuff. I just made up my own based on kind of common associations with stuff.

Miranda Metcalf  So is it somehow, is it a play on what, for instance, the pomegranate flower really represented? Or is it just completely your own?

Martin Mazorra  I think it's based on some things, like "Sultry Science," if you talked about jasmine, and there's that musky flavor that the white flour of jasmine has, like a particular olfactory association to it. And when I was looking at it, there were a whole bunch of scientific explanations of why that flower had [an] alluring aroma, you know what I mean? And so you're looking... that's it, I just dispelled the whole fucking beauty of it. But really, that's it, you know, you're going through and you're looking at it. And the pomegranate flower, too, I've made a couple of those too, based on the Song of Solomon. And in the Song of Solomon, the writer speaks of the beauty of this person and compares them to certain flowers. That was always interesting to me. It's a big, wonderful love poem that comes out of the Old Testament. And I just think that those things are really wonderful. But also, too, there's a rose, which is like... I don't know what the hell they call it. But they used to call it the Rose of Sharon. But then you find out the Rose of Sharon was like a crocus that grew on the plain of Sharon, and this references back to Israel. And so it's not the same flower as the common flower, or the one that my grandmother would tell me was the Rose of Sharon. So I don't know, there were flowers that we had growing up in West Virginia, too, that you would seed, and then others that were more common in people's yards and stuff like that, and then ones that were more exotic, I guess. And in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, too, there were... you know, you don't see anything for a couple of months. It's pretty gray. And then all of that stuff starts coming out and you see small patches of people's little bits of garden. And that, I think, was another thing too. It's like, I only worked on those flower things in the spring and in the summer. And then the rest of the year I just went back into my hate cave and carved black and white prints. Back into my less romantic, snarky... and made gnarly black and white prints. And then recently, too, birds have been appearing in your work. Is that kind of from a bit of a similar place in the same way that I think, historically, flowers... they take up a big place culturally, with weddings and deaths and symbols, and obviously in poetry, and I guess now that we're talking about it, birds do as well? Whether it's a raven or an owl or a robin, we do have strong associations with them as symbolism. Is that kind of what brought you to using birds? Those carvings of those birds kind of existed before the flowers, and I didn't really know what to do with them. And after I had kind of made the flowers for a while, I think that I had names for those birds, but I kind of went back through and revisited that copy for a lot of those. But like I said, it's been a kind of an ongoing project, this kind of... semantics of working through these things. And I do think that like, you're looking for imagery - I mean, I tried oysters, but trust me, man, anybody can draw an oyster. They're like formless goop. When you start reading about olfactory senses, then people have descriptions for all those kind of high notes and low notes and floral and powdery, and all those kinds of things. And then I was like, 'Well, you know, this gray glob, people have all these - they're briny, or they're meaty, or...' you know, all this kind of - to this snot ball. And I tried it with oysters, and I don't know... it was okay. Not as many people are, I guess, as fond of oysters as flowers and birds.

Miranda Metcalf  Do you like oysters?

Martin Mazorra  I do. I do. I like oysters. I've been known to go out of my way for them. I think, too, I kind of got interested in it too because they started this million oyster project, which is now a billion oyster project, here in the waterways around New York City where they're reseeding oyster beds after Hurricane Sandy. With the idea that those would purify the water and I guess prevent erosion in certain areas. But, you know, I had kind of gotten interested in them around that time.

Miranda Metcalf  In terms of the lexicon of plants and animals that carry strong symbolism, oysters are in there. Mystical erotic powers, to the fact that they make pearls on the inside from a grain of sand or something getting in, and the strong metaphor that can be drawn from that. I think anything that we interact with that seems to have a reveal that is something unique - so for instance, like reading tea leaves - an oyster is like that, right? Because you crack it open and you have no idea what's going to be on the inside.

Martin Mazorra  Right. More often than not, you just get a big snot ball, though.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. I've eaten a ton of oysters, and touch wood, I've never gotten sick from eating them. And I look them in their proverbial eye to decide which ones on the plate I'm going to eat.

Martin Mazorra  Yeah, you have your own mode of divination. I think that we invent that, right? We invent that. In terms of image making, I feel like that is interesting to me. And I think it's one of the reasons I like to look at other people's images as well, and engage with other artists and their work.

Miranda Metcalf  Right, yeah. And speaking of that, I definitely want to make sure we have time to chat a bit about Cannonball Press, because we've talked about it here and there throughout. Can you speak to it directly? And how and when it got started, your motivations, and what you do with it now?

Martin Mazorra  It started out as a means by which to print work by myself and my friends, and to produce an affordable piece of artwork. And so conceptually, the idea was that all the work would be black and white, all of it would be the same size, and it would all be 20 bucks. So it would establish a value for the work of a lot of younger artists that I was working with at the time. And I was working on a lot of different projects at the time too. I was also working, at that time that I started Cannonball, with my friends Mike Houston and David Ellis on this project called "The Barnstormers." We were painting and doing mural painting and stuff like that, time lapse painting. And the print project kind of started out of that. And we made some prints with David, and we made some prints with Mike and I, we started making prints with just different people that were around us. And then you would have this ready made group show, right? So now you have all this work, it all looks the same, kind of, in the same spirit, because it's all unified with that cohesive kind of aesthetic. And you had a ready made group show that you could show multiple times. And then if you did sell something, you still had work that was stacked in your closet or under the bed or whatever it was, you drug it out, and you could put on another one. And then, as we were working collaboratively with other people to make the work, Mike and I started making collaborative work together. So we started making collages from our woodcuts. So you had this kind of drawing that would happen after you made the initial drawing and carving and printing of the prints, and that became interesting. So the prints had this other life as well. The prints always kind of were the basis of this, but it was also kind of like the social situation the prints provided you to interact with other artists, and to have the support from other artists, and to be able to go to other studios and say, 'We're here to make prints,' or 'We're here to show our prints, and we're here to show prints of other people.' So it wasn't necessarily a collective, because it was much more dogmatic than that. Nobody was ever going to change the model, you know. But people can participate in it by making woodcuts, and then we would take it out and show it. And for about 12 years, it started out much slower. And then for about six or seven years, we were doing collaborative projects. We worked with David Krut in the city, but then we also went to South Africa and made a big project that we did for down there. Yep, made a 66 foot long parade snake that was covered in 1500 wood cuts. And we worked all summer to print, we solicited artists to send us scales, like a 10 by 10 inch square block, of an endangered Sub Saharan African species. And so all of those got printed, sewn together, and then flown to South Africa and we marched it around a music festival. Yeah, there were projects like that, and then there were projects that were smaller. You know, that's a pretty grand project, but we made a book project with the Philadelphia Independence Seaport Museum. And it was a small booklet about the Olympia, which was Admiral Dewey's fleet ship in the Great White Fleet at the end of the 19th century. It sailed around the world and then ended up in the Spanish American War in the Philippines. So that was an interesting topic to address, and the aspects of imperialism, and to try and do something with that that didn't necessarily skirt that issue but also that would actually - I think we ended up showcasing a lot of the... we talked about it, but I think we ended up talking mostly about the engineering feats that were aboard this ship. It's still down there, decaying into the Delaware River. But just sort of small stuff like that. And then all along the way, we were publishing prints by other artists. So we would ask people to carve blocks, they would send them back to us, we'd print them, we would send them editions, they would sign them, they would keep artist's proofs, we would keep editions, and we would sell those editions at different shows and print fairs. And we'd put on print fairs of ourselves anually, we did a $50 or less exhibition called Prints Gone Wild in New York. But a lot of this stuff, you know, I think a lot of this stuff, too, was before there were a lot of craft fairs and stuff like that. So that banquet table format that you see a lot of places, I mean, that was really early on for us. That was a big part of what we did, was to provide that opportunity to be able to be behind a banquet table and showcase your work for people. And you know, it ran its course in terms of being able to do that. And then the collaborative work changed, and I've been still publishing and still producing work as Cannonball. And this latest show that I'm doing now is kind of an iteration in the spirit of Cannonball. So I kind of, after the birds and after the flowers, I just made, the past six months, I've been making black and white letterpress and woodcut prints on fabric. And I'm doing a whole show based on signage. So that kind of outward signage that you'll see when you're driving down the road for somebody's business or service, and then I'm putting a kind of a twist on - like a more psychological twist - on all of those that are more reflective. So I have like a "Relationship Salvage Yard, both foreign and domestic, you can pick and pull your own parts." Yeah, stuff like that. "Death Grip Antiques, for your heart to let go of items." There's a whole bunch of them that are like that. So I'm really looking forward to this. So I've written a bunch of copy for that, and I've typeset all of those, and I'm going to be putting that on as kind of a Cannonball Press show. There'll be some $20 affordable flat stock as a component of it, and then these big goofy banners. Yeah, that's the current iteration of it.

Miranda Metcalf  And so when you're saying signs, I'm picturing kind of that really historical handpainted sign kind of a feel, is that...?

Martin Mazorra  Kind of, you know, in that spirit. Kind of, yeah. I mean, it's basically some real journeymen, flat-footed, typeset stuff. You know, I love that hand painted sign imagery. There's some hand carved typography in it as well. But several of the pieces are just giant lists printed with six inch letters. So there's like an 8 by 12 foot wall that's just six inch letters that's like the list of all the... the studio, I just recently moved my studio from Brooklyn, about three years ago, moved the studio from Brooklyn to a spot... an undisclosed location in Connecticut that I called the Hammonasset Hideout. And my only companions out there are a gaggle of wild turkeys that come to visit. But anyway, on the way from the highway to the studio, there's just all that stuff that you see every single time. So it's like those things that you would normally - before Google Maps, you would kind of have to use landmarks to navigate. And so this is just a list of all the landmarks that I would use to navigate to get to the studio. Like, so far past the ice place, and the place where you get the good fried clams and the soft serve. That's where they are.

Miranda Metcalf  So in theory, though, someone could use it to find your undisclosed location, though, then, yeah?

Martin Mazorra  They could. You'd have to read it, though. But yeah, they could. They could find me in my undisclosed location

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, you and the turkeys.

Martin Mazorra  Yeah, you look for that gaggle of turkeys. You'll find me.

Miranda Metcalf  Just hanging out. Yeah, that's good. It's good not to be alone too much.

Martin Mazorra  Until you start talking to them, and then that's...

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, well, aren't they like, they can be a little dangerous, right?

Martin Mazorra  I guess, you know, I guess. We kind of have a Tarzan relationship, me and the turkeys. You know, I go out and call to them. And they're really goofy. They're really goofy.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Yeah. So where's this upcoming exhibition going to be, if people would like to find it or experience it?

Martin Mazorra  It's going to be, it opens March 5, at Preacher in Austin, Texas. And you can find them @preacheraustin on the Instagram. It's a nice spot. It's a really, it's a super creative spot. They are a graphic design agency that's down there, and they're doing, they have a lot of really talented designers and copywriters that are working there. And they're doing some really interesting projects. And so I'm really pleased to be able to trick somebody into letting me show my stuff down there.

Miranda Metcalf  And is there anything else on the horizon that you're looking forward to that you'd like to talk about?

Martin Mazorra  The next three things that I got, it's about as far forward as I can get, it's to pretty much May. I'm going to be... what am I doing? I'm going to go and hang out with you at SGCI, right? Beginning of April. And then when we get back from Puerto Rico, I'm going to have some of the flowers, I'm going to be showing here in New York with Planthouse, which is a gallery that Katie Michel has in the flower district. It's actually across the street from the flower district in what was traditionally Tin Pan Alley. She's got a nice space there, so I'll be doing a show there. It will be up in April. And then I'm going to go to the Power of the Press Fest in Detroit. It's run by Signal-Return. Then I'm going to come back and I'm going to print sideshow imagery that will be in an exhibition this summer at the Freak Bar, the longest running sideshow on Coney Island, at the Coney Island Sideshow Museum. So if you're in New York this summer, you can go and hang out, and have a beer, see the sideshow. And then I'm going to probably go fishing for the rest of the summer. That's probably going to be about it for me. If I get to that point by Memorial Day weekend, I think I'm just gonna check out for a few months and fish and hang out with the turkeys.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, that sounds like a good way to close up a summer. Top off with the sideshow, and then go hang out with the turkeys.

Martin Mazorra  Right? In the undisclosed location.

Miranda Metcalf  In the undisclosed, but maybe if somebody really wanted to disclose it, they'd have to go see your show in Austin, location. Yeah.

Martin Mazorra  Right, exactly. I think there's probably like some geotracking you could do from my photos or something.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I'm sure. If people were very, very keen. So if they wanted to get more clues about how to find you, how can they follow you online and ping your photos and that kind of thing?

Martin Mazorra  Right. I've got a presence on on the Instagrammer, it's @mmazorra. And then there's @cannonballpress. And I've got cannonballpress.com and martinmazorra.net. That's it.

Miranda Metcalf  I'll definitely put links in the show notes to those so people can start their tracking. And other than that, yeah, I just want to thank you for joining me for an hour to chat about all the things, including turkeys and sideshows and oysters. It's been real fun.

Martin Mazorra  Yeah, it was a good time. Thank you so much for having me. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I'm really looking forward to sharing it with everyone and seeing you in Puerto Rico. That'll be good.

Martin Mazorra  Right on, yeah. Sounds good.

Miranda Metcalf  Thanks again, Martin. Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again next week when my guest will be Omar Musa. Omar is a hip hop artist, poet, and published novelist who recently came to printmaking and has produced the most playful and moving woodcuts, which skillfully mix imagery with words. You won't want to miss it. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing help from Timothy Pauszek - and sometimes commentary about what's cool and what's not cool - with music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you next week.