SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN HIS STUFFED SCHEDULE, I GOT THE CHANCE TO SIT DOWN WITH WINNIPEG PRINT MEDIA  ARTIST JEREMIAH VALLE IN HIS LOVELY STUDIO TO TALK ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH TATTOOS, THE CULTURE SURROUNDING IT, AND HOW HE USES THAT TO TALK ABOUT DEEPER ISSUES THROUGH HIS EVER-EXPERIMENTAL TAKE ON PRINT MEDIA. 

 

 

Before we get to talking I see a print on Valle’s studio desk and I’m taken by it, I ask Valle how he made it...but I soon find out that print in particular was one by his mentor, friend and former instructor Ted Horoworth Valle goes on to enthusiastically talk about him: “That print is mezzotint. I’ve worked for Ted and I’ve worked at his house and his house is just filled with prints. Prints just everywhere. He works mostly at home and at Martha Street. So he does most of his prep work for his copper plates at home, does most of his digital stuff at home—he’s really good at Photoshop for an old guy...you’d think that he doesn't know how to use that new technology but he really knows his way around it”[laughs].

 

 

Public Parking: Did he retire from teaching?

 

Jeremiah Valle: Yeah, what happened was they sort of slowly pushed him out by only giving drawing classes. I remember in April, early May [Insert Year], I was coming to work at his house and we were just chatting, having coffee, and we got to talking and as soon as he sat down  he was looking down at the ground then talking about his position and just said he put in his letter of resignation. It felt like he was so heartbroken. It was so sad. He’s been teaching since like the 70s. He’s just so full of knowledge...if we are ever having lunch together we’d just be talking about printmaking and he’ll tell me so many things that I’d never be able to experience or know of otherwise without knowing him. So every time I get a chance around him it’s just really treasured.

 

 

PP: Has he seen your new body of work?

 

JV: Some of it. I showed him a little bit of the pieces separately but not together in the gallery space. I just showed him the designs and he taught they were hilarious.
 

PP: What was your first introduction to printmaking?

 

 

JV: It was with Ted with silk-screening but technically, thinking back, I first heard about it through my friend Robin Walls. I met her my first year at school and we kind of hit it off and became good friends. And I’d always bump into her and she’d show me prints and she saw the work I was doing before and she thought my work would translate really well with printing. And at that point I’d been wanting to kind of finding new ways to take drawing further and try new things with it. This is actually an example of work I was doing when Robin introduce printing [He pulls out a painting he did in high school]

 

 

During that time I was really into tattooing and I was doing designs for other people and I had that with me as kind of a reminder when I was starting out this body of work. When Robin saw that, she was like that is printmaking so we later collaborated on a piece. She took one of my drawing and turned it into a positive and she incorporated it into another body of work. So then right after that I took silkscreen with Ted...was my first formal class in printmaking.

At first, I sucked. [laughs] I remember how crazy that semester was for me and I wasn’t able to put as much effort into it...i did ok in the class but if I had a little more time with it I probably could have gotten more done.

 

 

 

PP: So were you able to do more drawing in screen printing? I feel like it’s become more photo driven.

 

JV: Oh yeah! I had such an anxiety over Photoshop. Not till this year that I started using Photoshop. I’m pretty low tech. But once I learned how I was able to so many things that helped me get to this body of work.

 

PP:It’s nice to see what one can produce when you are thrown into a situation where they have to learn something completely new.

 

 

JV:Yeah, unfortunately I never had that opportunity before because the courses I later took for printmaking, the person that taught them--we all know who that is—she was very set in the way she wanted things done and the materials to use. She does not like anything digital, she prefers everything made by hand; which I prefer and its fine, but it’s limiting and at least I’m open to other print media besides that. Everything in this body of work is digital but it started from a hand drawings and painting then it transitioned.

 

 

PP: So what was the next print class for you?

 

JV: I did intaglio and other classes with said person and it was incorporating other print media methods and trying to expand them beyond the tradition of editioning. So using it as a vehicle instead of it being a main focus. So printing as a tool to make shirts; you don’t focus so much on the idea of silk screening but you focus it as a shirt more than anything.

 

 

PP: Do you think that experience was a good bridge that got you this body of work?

 

 

JV: Yes and No...mostly no, but it did get me thinking beyond just prints which eventually I would have start considering on my own. At the same time, I could have gotten to where I am now earlier if I didn’t have such restrictions. It’s like why am I printing on fabric? And that’s a restriction so I had to find something as to why it’s on fabric as opposed to having an idea and expanding it beyond just regular materials.

 

 

PP: So going back to high school painting, it seems like you where into tattoos and the aesthetics of it way back...

 

JV: Yeah I was very much into the subcultures at a very young age. I’d go to punk shows in south Osborne all the time, I would use to help out with bands, roadie, do lights and that was my first introduction to tattooing and tattoos and it this relations to resistance and anti culture which is usually associated with punk. This is when the deep-V was very popular and you see these guys with tattoos and they are covered all

and I thought that was so cool. My friends started getting tattoo when they were 18 or younger and would always tell me to draw them something. And I’d do research and looked up designs for inspiration. They’d use those drawing for their tattoos...so then I got encouraged to do more drawing and as time went by I decided to pursue a fine arts degree.

 

 

"...I like to be nice and clean...and growing up with a house full of women I've learned from them a lot...[but] it’s always this thing of trying to be “man” because if you show signs of weakness; you are a “girl” which is considered a bad thing."

 

 

PP: so then,in moving into this body of work with exploring the culture around contemporary tattoo culture...what became your main interest within that...

 

 

JV: I wanted to go a little beyond the form of otherness. In my previous works a lot of socio-political under tones have come up in relation to misogyny within subcultures; you got biker gangs, music subcultures like punk—you’ve this over sexualization of the female body and especially in tattoos you have that through pinup models. And the tradition of the pin up was to take on the role of any subculture and emit that through various imageries; so she takes on the role of the sailor, the mistress etc. I was working with that and kind of like trying to erase or rework that imagery and go along with this concept...at the same time trying to be wary of this whole notion of being too blunt...tiptoeing around these very tender issues and I’ve previously done work around men having to live up to this very masculine façade. For me, my father is like this trucker manly man, mechanic, dirty, grimy but I like to be nice and clean...and growing up with a house full of women I’ve learned from them a lot...and it’s always this thing of trying to be “man” because if you show signs of weakness; you are a “girl” an that is considered a bad thing. Feminism is a form of weakness etc. Therefore, I related the two where I took these female forms and then made them into men who are these gender neutral/gender bended images; where by there’s this uncertainty of weather they are men or women. So the figure on the light box kind of speaks to that. And I printed similar images on female and male designed shirts; so it’s like women can wear naked pin up men on their shirts in a way reclaiming the pin up imagery.

 

 

PP: I think you are entirely successful in bringing that through with the work that you have made...and having an image making medium like tattooing which can be seen in the “art” world as lesser and opening it up for closer observation from a very unusual point view is exceedingly done well...you rarely find talk about contemporary tattoos and tattooing in contemporary art...

 

JV: It’s funny, because months before starting on this body of work I had a lot going on and I was unsure about a lot of things and what to do, I was on-the-fence about everything...but Dan [Dell Agnese]and Ted-really big mentors for me—I was talking to them and they gave me the courage to move forward with this project. Then it developed more over the period of making it; different things started to pop up which expanded the themes I was going after. I didn’t know how to speak about tattoos and the culture around it through art. I feel like art has this status that I couldn’t reach and tattooing was this like blue-collar kind of subject matter. But honestly in doing this work I feel like it represented myself really well and what it was ultimately interested in.

 

“I feel like people who know a lot about tattoos but not much fine arts can look at the work and see something familiar in a different context and open up the conversation that way.”

 

PP: I think bringing tattooing and the cultures surrounding it, into art kind equalizes it with art in a way...

 

JV: Yeah it’s kind of like a bridge that goes both ways. I feel like people who know a lot about tattoos but not much fine arts can look at the work and see something familiar in a different context and open up the conversation that way.

 

PP: So tell me about your tattooing apprenticeship?

 

 

JV: I’m currently working on my license for that. I’m still getting use to the machines for the tattooing but I can’t legally work on people yet.

 

 

PP: So do you think you’ve come to a good conclusion on this body of work?

 

JV: There is definitely room to expand it further I think. I would like to explore more of what I was talking about in this work through other mediums and also rework and reiterate other pieces. I have these [beer] bottles and I had them on plinths and I called it 'Six-pack'...so the labels are silk screened and I put them on the bottles. So the kind of the joke to it is like a six pack but there’s only five and you see this Winnipeg-handshake coming across it...kind of reflecting on beer as a commodity and on men in bar-fights.

 

 

 

 

 

Big Thanks to Laina Brown for helping document the studio visit.