X-TRA Members are our subscribers and donors. Join or renew as a Member at $75-level or higher, before March 1, and receive these bonus editions by Susan Silton!

Susan Silton has generously released 30 each of two hot-off-the-press posters from Greece and Russia for our February Membership Drive.

Don’t miss out! Join now at $75 level or higher.
You’ll get the next 4 issues, give crucial support to X-TRA’s programs . . . and you’ll receive these 2 prints:

Susan Silton, Make-Ready, The Lost Posters (Greece and Russia), 2004–. Offset prints, each 24 x 19 inches.

(Offer available while supplies last!)

About the edition

Make-Ready: The Lost Posters (2004–) by Susan Silton
An ongoing series of internationally-printed posters by Los Angeles artist Susan Silton

The term “make-ready” refers in commercial printing to a process that occurs just prior to a project actually being on press. Paper feeders are adjusted, ink fountains are filled, printing plates are set up, image registration is established, and ink densities are calibrated: it is a sequence of orchestrated actions intended to ensure precision in the final product. Typically stacks of paper are designated just for this process; press operators perform make ready, layer over layer, for several unrelated projects before these stacks are finally discarded as waste. Anyone who has spent time in proximity to the insistent hum of commercial printing machinery, is aware that the stack of paper in the room that seduces, like moth to a flame, is the stack of waste. These sheets reflect an inky collision between form and content, capturing what results when random accumulations of disparate texts and images pile on top of each other and form no meaning, or an altogether different kind of meaning. They are the exquisite detritus of press operators and printing machines performing their respective functions. First and always a discard, an artifact of commercial production, make-ready collapses not only many layers of information into an abstraction, but authorship as well.

Make-Ready: The Lost Posters is an ongoing series begun in 2004. Silton commissions printers in different countries (printing being an international language) to simulate the process of make-ready, using jobs they are either currently printing or have printed in the past. For each country’s edition of 500 identical posters, printers run several layers of projects, at the end of which comes one final layer overprinted in silver ink; these final layers are all song titles that contain the word “lost.” Except for signed multiple editions, Silton gives away all posters in selective releases.

Make-Ready: The Lost Posters speaks to the disorientation of the moment, the dislocation of the body, the destabilization of meaning, and the chaotic beauty which potentially lies within all of it.