Free Shipping
St Louis - New Haven - San Antonio - Lima. 2015-2024

Free Shipping.  (Translated Mercado Libre in Lima since the concept free shipping does not exist in Peru.)

Sumi ink on cardboard boxes saved by the artists and the institution, size of a wall. Painted onsite in collaboration with their daughter Agnes, and sometimes in collaboration with the public. The material is a symbol of the world market: the Cardboard Box Index is used by investors to gauge consumer consumption futures.

Luminary St Louis, Missouri. Curated by James McAnally. 2015
Artspace New Haven, Connecticut. Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. 2022
Artpace San Antonio, Texas. Curated by Missla Libsekal. 2023
Centro Cultral de España Lima. Lima, Peru. Curated by Maricel Delgado. 2024

Ink is our commons, and a renewable resource. Black ink is made from soot, that is, carbon, by burning organic material such as oil, sap, bones, and tar. Making ink from soot is common human knowledge,
independently discovered by many early cultures, a shared scientific heritage.

In ancient Egypt ink was obtained by burning wood or oil and mixing the resulting concoction with water and gum arabic. Around 3200 B.C. scribes used black, carbon-based ink for the body of text. The ancient Maya made carbon black ink made of soot scraped off the bottoms of cooking pans, producing high quality carbon. The Aztecs called soot-based ink tlilpopotzalli, a name derived from the Nahuatl noun tlilli, which refers to soot or black ink, and the verb popotza, which means “to produce smoke.”

As artists, we are drawn to rich, black inks, attracted to their density, smoothness, and flow of application. A surface covered with lampblack ink will absorb about 97% of incident light.

Locked inside with all the doors and windows taped shut during the annual West Coast forest fires, it struck us that the same material we were using to make drawings also produced the thick, relentless blanket of smoke outside.

Week after week, the sun was obscured by the smoke of millions of trees burning completely out of control in the draught-dried temperate rainforests of British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Incalculably massive columns of forest fire smoke poured into the stratosphere, hazy orange light was noted across North America, as far east as New York City, and the smoke was detected as far as Amsterdam. The fires generated their own weather systems, fire tornadoes, high winds, pyrocumulonimbus fire-clouds, lightening, changed wind direction and even heated the atmosphere. The size and power of the fires cannot be depicted by language, and despite a proliferation of newspaper coverage, those of us who are able, simply moved on to the next crisis: is it economic collapse next? Forest fires are burning on earth almost year around, shifting with the seasons from the northern hemisphere to the southern. The last time there was this much wood turning to carbon, it deposited the coal marking the end-Permian extinction event. Those of us living near these massive fires were advised to use masking tape to seal up all the vents, ducts, cracks, and gaps in our homes, to minimize the air entering our living spaces. Some mention was given to the unstudied hazards of breathing this dark air, especially toxic to those who work or sleep outside, but no solutions were offered. We were and are on our own.