Albuquerque-based visual artist Karl Orozco disassembles broken inkjet printers, coats their components in CMYK ink and stamps them onto large-format paper to create vibrant relief prints that are part forensic investigation, part monument to planned obsolescence.
It started with an Epson inkjet printer sitting next to a dumpster at work for several weeks. The fault was minor: it was grabbing two sheets of paper at a time, triggering a sensor and halting all operations. The machine had been deemed irreparable. Karl Orozco looked at it and thought about what was happening inside, and then he took it apart.
That first printer has since become more than a dozen, sourced from yard sales, thrift stores and friends. Each one is broken apart, cleaned and labelled by function: exterior shell, interacts with paper, internal structure, interfaces with ink. The components are then coated in black ink and stamped as relief prints onto paper, scanned and rendered digitally in CMYK on Adobe Illustrator. A final array of screw impressions is printed onto 30 by 22 inch Stonehenge paper as a registration guide, and then each component is inked in cyan, yellow, magenta or black, assigned by its original function in the machine, and stamped across an edition of five. From start to finish, one variable edition can take up to six months.
“With Printer’s Proofs, my process is akin to eating crabs,” Orozco says. “Disassembly is as important as production, and the fun comes in extracting as much meat, I mean, printable surface area, from each piece as possible. Like the scavenging crab, I love digging through the scraps.”
That appetite for extraction has expanded over time: he now removes all stickers and serial codes from each printer to overlay the final print, and collects felt from the maintenance boxes to create subtle debossing in the paper. Every part of the machine is a candidate.
The results are large-scale works that feel both archaeological and celebratory, the internal anatomy of a frustrating, fragile, ubiquitous object rendered in the very colour system it was designed to deploy. “The final, large-scale prints lie somewhere between tapestry and taxidermy,” Orozco says, “vibrant, layered, excavations of complex, deeply fragile machines.” The question posed by the project’s title, how do you print a printer, turns out to have a very literal answer. You take it apart and use it as a stamp.
Karl Orozco is a visual artist working in printmaking, video and installation, based in Albuquerque. His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Bronx Museum, the Neon Museum of Las Vegas, 1415 Gallery and Sanitary Tortilla Factory. He is co-founder of Risolana, a community risograph studio in Albuquerque’s South Valley.
ARTIST LINKS
karlorozco.com
@yung_buko
Printer’s Proofs, 2024 to 2025. Disassembled inkjet printer parts, relief printed on Stonehenge paper. Variable edition of 5. Works include: Printer’s Proof no. 1 (EPSON XP-434), 22 x 30in; Printer’s Proof no. 2 (HP OfficeJet 4635), 30 x 44in; Printer’s Proof no. 4 (EPSON SC-P700), 30 x 60in.
