Swamp Thing

For their exhibition at SPACE, Sun System Press presents a collection of large-scale murals and wallpaper that are based on their site-responsive installations and publishing collaborations over the past several years.

The collective will produce a publication available during the New England Art Book Fair in conjunction with their installation. The installation highlights printing techniques the collective has used within their practice spanning laser printed (low-fi) zines, books printed through offset and digital presses, inkjet posters, and risograph prints. This will be, in part, a response to the installation’s life during the art book fair, where many other vendors will display printed matter using the same printing techniques.

Throughout the exhibition, The back room in the gallery will host an environment of physical and audible relaxation as well as temporal transportation. Transparency materials suspended from the ceiling create a chromatic canopy of images from Sun System Press’s collaborative archive of paradisical, refracted images of wilderness.  Filtered through lights at various angles, these images are set against a looping soundtrack produced by Sun System Press’s frequent collaborator, Inner Sanctum. Inner Sanctum is a New Jersey-based musician who makes field recordings and musical samples that he later distorts and includes in his psychedelic and swampy music.

This is the Swamp Thing — broken hexagons, deer skulls and beer bottles scattered in the swamp, as if someone or something is leaving clues, but it’s all just dus — as if a giant dirt bomb of our cultural debris was blasted in the face of nature, exploding discarded artifacts across the peripheral landscape. It is a voyage into the incidental and magnetic landscapes roiling at the edges of our civilization. Take our eyes, let our visions guide your subconscious through the intoxicating rhythm of the jungle. Walk with us on the perimeter of our culture, through the tunnel of time.

Sun System Press is a publishing collaboration between Cole Casswell  (Peaks Island, ME), Bryan Graf (Portland, ME), and CJ Heyliger (Los Angeles, CA). They publish and distribute artist books, posters and edition prints. They focus on experimental, low-fi methods of production.

Follow Sun System Press on Instagram – @sunsystempress

Cole Caswell researches the remnants and patterns in the landscape that reflect contemporary strategies of survival. Through strata of observation, technology, subjectivity, and his surroundings, Caswell investigates geography and its impact on our perceived ability to survive. He uses traditional, historic and digital photographic media—including tintypes, environmental data sets, and augmented sampling procedures—to investigate our present condition.

Cole received an interdisciplinary M.F.A. from the Maine College of Art, and has been working, living and traveling throughout the county in a nomadic format. At the present he is exploring ones ability to subsist within our contemporary environment, while furthering his inquirers into emergent and experimental photographic processes, perspectives, and applications. His studio is located on Peaks Island off the coast of Maine.

Follow Cole on Instagram – @colecaswell

Bryan Graf navigates the photographic medium with a discursive interest in the history of photography and it’s relationship to design, painting, and narrative fiction. His practice involves mixing tracks (or prints) that have visceral, optical and conceptual relationships.

He received an MFA from Yale University in 2008 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2005. Graf has held solo shows nationally and internationally. His work has been exhibited at the George Eastman House Museum, (Rochester, NY); Institute of Contemporary Art, (Portland, ME); and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, (Lincoln, MA) and has appeared in numerous publications, including Blind Spot, Details, Harpers and the New York Times.

Graf published four books: Wildlife Analysis (Conveyor, 2013); Moving Across the Interior(ICA@MECA, 2014); Prismatic Tracks (Conveyor, 2014); and Debris of The Days (Conveyor 2017). His photographs and books are held in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Museum of Art, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, International Center of Photography, and the Tokyo Institute of Photography.

Follow Bryan on Instagram – @bryangrafstudio

CJ Heyliger grew up on the Colorado Front Range and is currently based in Los Angeles, California. He received a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2006. CJ is a founding member of Sun System Press, a publishing collaborative he shares with Cole Caswell and Bryan Graf. He is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles.

Follow CJ on Instagram – @cjheyliger