I've got some good news and I've got some bad news.
The bad news is Cold Cube Press, a genre-busting risograph outfit run by Aidan Fitzgerald and Michael Heck, is ditching the gallery space in the Tashiro Kaplan Building and moving into a smaller studio in Pioneer Square. It will continue on as a company, but they won't be throwing awesome/awkward parties fueled by coolers of Rainier on First Thursdays anymore. They want to focus on publishing books and creating their own personal work. Now that Mount Analogue, Cold Cube, and Gramma Press are out of the X Y Z galleries, that whole scene is spaceless.
The good news is they're throwing a closing party at the space (300 S Washington St) on Saturday, May 25, during which they will release a new anthology of work, Cold Cube 05. The annual collection will feature 17 artists from around the country and around the world. More than half of the artists showcased in this edition live outside the United States.
Unlike previous iterations, CC05 will include no poetry or short fiction. When asked why they were excluding literature this time, Fitzgerald said, "It's not permanent, we're just shooting from the hip with this anthology."
Nevertheless, the collection is still a mix of visual disciplines. You've got your pure abstraction comics, your funny auto-bio stuff, your abstract auto-bio stuff, and your prints of a woman and a man wearing a living wolf head freaking out near a giant aloe plant as a UFO rains down blood from the sky.
All of it, to borrow a line from Wallace Stevens, "resists the intelligence / almost successfully." All of it deserves a place on your wall, or at least on your Instagram feed.
I'm particularly enamored with a muted, narrative comic from the Spanish artist Begoña GarcĂa-AlĂ©n. The comic takes the form of an illustrated letter. In pale turquoise and pale orange, she sketches out mundane but pretty scenes of her daily life—birds out a window, a flower growing in the garden, a cat. But after a few panels, we realize she's sort of sadly making her life out to be slightly better than it is and that she has mixed feelings for the recipient. Beneath a series of panels of a dog peeing on a tree, she writes, "I wish you all the best, good luck!"
The other good news is that Cold Cube will continue publishing at their current clip (though they're taking the summer off to work on their own projects). They've already published six books in 2019, including the tiny wonder that is Maniac at Large by Corey Brewer. The book is composed of printed screenshots of newspaper headlines from early horror movies. My favorite headline is either "LEGS CUT OFF!" or "WEIRD KILLER STILL AT LARGE."
Including the anthology, Cold Cube has five more books on deck, making this their most productive year yet. Heck and Fitzgerald started the printing company in Fitzgerald's apartment in June of 2015. For the last two years, they've been publishing out of the gallery space. During that time, they've put the work of 109 local, national, and international artists in front of the faces of Seattle gallerygoers. May they continue to do so forever, now with fewer distractions.
