Pittsburgh-based artist and filmmaker David Bernabo creates letterpress prints that operate like surreal maps. His imagined landscapes lean into anti-perspective, collage logic, and architectural fragments, allowing each work to unfold like a narrative about place, memory, and societal structures. Printmaking is only one part of Bernabo’s wider studio practice, which spans documentary filmmaking, painting, photograms, and sound. Collaboration is central to how he works, and the city of Pittsburgh is woven deeply into the fabric of his projects. Fellow artists, print shops, and musicians make regular appearances in his creative process, turning the studio into a shared space of experimentation.
Bernabo’s recent printmaking journey began in 2023 through a collaboration with printmaker Haylee Ebersole, then co-owner of Meshwork Press, a letterpress shop known for greeting cards. Together, they produced five editions of letterpress prints on a 1929 Chandler and Price platen press. The project required a technique that generated gradients directly on the ink disc, creating a constantly shifting flow of colour. The result was a series of prints that could never truly be repeated. As the ink thinned and was reapplied, hues changed, and blends shifted, giving each impression its own character. Each design was printed in a numbered edition of ten and a larger unnumbered run of fifty that accompanied vinyl releases by Bernabo’s band Watererer.
These works were exhibited in September 2024 at Bottom Feeder Books in a show titled Light From the Bottom of Your Shoe, presented alongside works by Ebersole and fellow artist Andrew Allison. While the three artists approached their subjects differently, each explored landscapes in some form. Care for the World (2023) reflected on environmental degradation. Frightened by Revelations (2024) examined collapsing time through architectural distortion. Flower to the Mind (2024) layered forms that suggested interior and exterior realms shifting against one another.
Meshwork Press closed in 2024, prompting Bernabo to expand his printmaking on his own terms. He began carving hand-cut linocuts in his home studio, developing a new print, Lord Looks Good (2024), in a small edition of four. Although letterpress and linocut operate very differently, both approaches fed into the development of his larger works. In 2025 and 2026, Bernabo is preparing six nine-foot paintings for a solo exhibition at Union Hall in Pittsburgh. These paintings extend the format of the letterpress works, with linocuts incorporated as stencil like textures and background structures. The interplay between print and painting has become a driving force in his evolving practice.
Bernabo reflects on his printmaking with a sense of curiosity and humility. “I am relatively new to printmaking. So, when approaching a new tool, I tend to start simply and then grow more complicated as I understand what I can and want to do. Each of the five prints pushes my use of the format in some way. Increasingly nuanced line work, more adventurous gradient applications, and shifting image density. It is basically the way I approach filmmaking and sound work, too.”
This cross-disciplinary approach is a defining element of Bernabo’s career. As an artist, musician and independent filmmaker, he moves fluidly between mediums. His documentaries explore subjects such as regional food systems, climate change, studio practices of composers and artists, and the histories of arts institutions like the Mattress Factory. His film Moundsville, co-directed with journalist John W. Miller, screened on PBS for three years, and his documentary Just For The Record offers a biographical look at avant-garde composer Blue Gene Tyranny. His work appears in the Mattress Factory Archives, UbuWeb, and in the Thomas and Katherine Detre Library and Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center.
Through printmaking, Bernabo continues to expand a visual language concerned with environment, structure and the fluidity of time. The studio remains a place where film, sound, and print overlap, and where collaboration fuels new directions.
