cmyk

cmyk began in a print shop, where the hum of offset presses and the smell of ink first merged with my curiosity for art and design. It is that shop, rebuilt as a system.

Each piece is a page coming off a press that does not exist: CMYK process plates or a single Pantone spot, laid down in true press order as fields of polygons and numerals I drew by hand, with the furniture of pre-press left visible - registration crosses, calibration bars that genuinely measure each sheet's ink coverage, plate labels, proof annotations. The press is honest: plates drift out of register on proofs, ink swells in the midtones, a sheet occasionally ghosts the one before it, dust leaves a hickey in the ink. Half the edition are proofs and carry the marks of checking; half are finals, dead-registered and clean.

Every structuring number is Fibonacci. The numerals - 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, drawn in 2023 and untouched by machine since - are the piece's alphabet: each token writes its own hash in them, one Zeckendorf decomposition at a time, with a miniature registration cross standing in for zero. The edition is 144.

Watch a piece open and it prints itself: the job ticket first, then the plates in press order, then the proofing marks. One token in ten runs on a failing press and slowly walks out of register while displayed - the same way every time for that token, deterministically, forever. Reload, and it is minted-perfect again.

It is both a love letter to the mechanical beauty of print and a reminder that even in perfect registration, imperfection leaves the best marks.

In final review. Releasing on Verse, 2026.