Introducing Seattle’s newest publisher, Cold Cube Press
Michael Heck’s Dark Matter is a 40-page book of dreamy drawings Risograph-printed in three colors. The drawings, made daily throughout January and February of this year, are micro-vignettes and Heck invites readers to take them in however they see fit. As the title may suggest, the book’s content is focused on the ever-present but barely visible: plant and insect life, strange shapes and movements. Dark Matter marks the inception of Cold Cube Press.
Cold Cube co-founder Aiden Fitzgerald describes a Risograph as the weird baby of photocopying and screen-printing. Via digital scanner, images are burned onto a master sheet in much the same way images are burned into a silkscreen. The master is then wrapped around an ink drum and copies are made as the drum rolls over blank sheets, forcing ink through the voids in the master sheet.
Along with Heck and Fitzgerald, Minh Nguyen and Raya Leary are Cold Cube’s principals. Nguyen emphasizes that Cold Cube Press is first and foremost a printing press focused on providing high-quality, affordable services.
“We’re trying to provide another printing outlet for people [where they can] entrust their work in the hands of artists who also make independent books,” she says.
In addition to printing, Cold Cube will publish curated, biannual anthologies. The first anthology, slated for publication in June, will showcase 13 different artists working in varying mediums, from poetry to video stills. The anthology series, and Cold Cube’s publishing in general, aims to represent not only different mediums but artists of different backgrounds as well.
“We want to publish people from all different sexes, ethnicities, ages,” Fitzgerald says. “We don’t want to be just single white males or females. We’re trying to get [to] all of Seattle and publish as many people as we can.”
The seed for Cold Cube was planted when Fitzgerald, a founding member of Seattle comics quarterly Intruder, bought a Risograph printer from fellow Intruder artist Alexa Koenings.
“I’ve been wanting to do a project like this for a long time,” Fitzgerald says, “where I can publish work from a lot of different people under one umbrella and get them talking to each other. But I realized I needed to ask for some help from people who I knew and admired.”
First he reached out to Nguyen, an exhibit developer at the Wing Luke Museum and freelance illustrator. From there, the pair contacted Raya Leary, 4Culture’s head of community outreach, and Michael Heck, a graphic designer at Pokémon’s Redmond campus and founding member of the Pity Party artist collective.
“We’re all involved in the arts, but in different ways,” Nguyen says. “That’s what helps us thrive and work together as a group.”
The cooperation of Cold Cube’s founders is a microcosm of what they hope their press will inspire in Seattle’s broader arts landscape. The intent is to bring various art communities together in conversation with each other.
“Or in argument with each other, even,” Nguyen says.
This month, Cold Cube will print Michael Heck’s next book of daily drawings and a collaborative comic book by Nguyen and Fitzgerald. And the young publishers are eager to broaden their roster.
“We’re looking for weirdo, out-there work in poetry comics, fiction, fine art, photography,” Fitzgerald says. “We publish things that work alongside each other. We want to take artists that we really love and mash ’em up together.”