OUR STORY

We have been involved in publication work since… 1976. Yes, it’s hard for us to believe that much time has gone by (and it took us that long to start a press). We started out, like a lot of folks in publishing, doing production work for a community newspaper. It was called ‘paste up’ in those days, because type was actually pasted on to formatted sheets, in columns and so on, then photographed to make negatives from which lithographic plates were made, which were then put onto printing presses to produce paper copies. A lot has changed but the spirit of the thing, the creation of something for public distribution remains the same.

Here’s a brief chronology of our various publishing experiences since then.

It all started with this, cutting and pasting artwork up for printing of the publisher of several tabloid size community newspapers in Winnipeg.

That led to returning to university (Fine Arts, U of Manitoba) to complete a degree. Which led to graduate school (NSCAD) at which I created this publication as my thesis. Mirror of the World dabbled in the then current ‘post-modern’ trend of text/image cultural critique, informed by the likes of Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke. The work, slides and text, was exhibited in Halifax and later in Winnipeg, and publication, magazine format, followed. But to be honest, it’s all kind of a blur as I immersed myself back in publishing, and not just publishing but tabloid newspapers. I started doing paste up again while working with the art collective Midcontinental Media Group on the side, producing a quarterly tabloid paper that was both much more and much less than a proper art magazine. I wrote about the experience in 1991 in Border Crossings magazine (copy of the full article here).