“Make-ready” is a general term that describes the process of preparing a press for printing. It is also used to define the waste-paper stock that passes through the press before color, registration, and ink density are adjusted and approved by the press operators. In order to conserve paper, printed sheets of make-ready from earlier runs are often fed into the press until the next form’s settings are correct, resulting in the arbitrary superimposition of disparate images on these sheets.

This exhibition comprised a representative selection of these sheets that I collected from the press runs of the first 14 issues of Esopus in Winnipeg, Canada. Not only are they fascinating artifacts from the sheet-fed printing process, many of them are visually arresting collages created by the press operators who routinely feed these sheets into the press. The show featured 50 press sheets either mounted on the walls or laid out on a series of tables in the space. It also incorporated a single-channel video of footage taken during the press run of Esopus 14.