Terran Last Gun has collaborated with printmaker Mitchell Marti of Interbang Press on five new lithographs, and as far as we know, no one has translated ledger art into lithography before. The ledger sheet at the base of each print was itself made with lithography, nearly indistinguishable from an antique sheet, down to the handwritten accounts and the printed lines bleeding through from the back.
"When Mitchell proposed this collaboration to me, it was an immediate yes," says gallery owner Frank Rose. "When we first started working with Terran, his work was essentially all screenprints. His practice has shifted into primarily ledger drawing and it is brilliant to come back to print media, while expressing much of the complexity of ledger work."
Mitchell had been watching for years. "Working as a collaborative printer, it is seldom that I get the opportunity to work with someone like Terran Last Gun, for whom printmaking is their primary visual language," he writes, describing a reverence he reserves for fellow printmakers. Terran's silkscreen practice couples brilliantly with his reductive geometric vocabulary, letting him print flat fields, subtle gradients, hard-edged shapes. The ledger drawings opened a different question. They "place opaque fields of color next to translucent ones, warm hues next to cool, often reducing the palette to subtle monochromatic variants that float over the rows and columns of the ledger," and Mitchell couldn't stop turning over how Terran might bridge them with his print work.
His answer was lithography, which "lends itself to both really fine lines and geometric flat shapes, as well as handling the subtle color shifts needed." The two landed quickly on chine collé, collaging thin washi that resembles ledger paper onto a heavy cotton rag base. Printing text on both sides of the washi let a small amount of ink leak through to the front, adding a translucent layer before the sheet was glued down.
Terran singles this out: "It's incredible how Mitchell was able to make printmaking paper look like an actual ledger sheet, he even printed the ledger lines and writing on the back side of the paper to more closely resemble the original ledgers. It's the little details that make these lithographs so excitingly fresh and intriguing."
For Terran this was a first encounter with lithography and a first collaboration with a master printer. "I approached this project with an open mind and really leaned in on Mitchell's feedback and suggestions, also taking into consideration the gallery input. Working in this collaborative manner I didn't know what to expect. By the end of the project my work had evolved into something entirely new and unexpected." These works, he says, "add to how we can view the media of ledger art and how ledger art can be documented in printmaking form. It's a record of a record," a phrase that opens onto something he keeps returning to: "Whether it's antique ledger sheets, archival printmaking paper, cliff walls, or bison hides, recording on various objects and nature has always been an innate trait of humanity."
The forms stay true to his vocabulary. All five prints are square, chosen "for its uniformity," a shape he likes for its simplicity and symmetry and treats as "a container, a foundation, and an entry point." His color thinking runs through harmonious schemes, monochromatic through tetrad, grayscale and gradation, and he describes the results as "fragments of human imagination, and the moods they create are activated by their color combinations."
Complex Wonder To Gaze Upon, 2026
edition of 7, twenty-seven color lithograph
20 x 53 in
$6400 unframed / $6950 framed
Complex Wonder to Gaze Upon, the largest work in the group, runs 27 colors across five sheets at 20 by 53 inches. "It is true to its title," Rose says. "The amount of labor and technical understanding needed to create a piece like this is mind-blowing. Seeing Terran's vision executed this way merges into the spirit of the title, that of awe and wonder. Whether that's for the natural world, the resiliency of one's culture, or mastery of a craft, these works contain all these ideas."
Mitchell describes the collaboration as "filled with good conversations that turned into intriguing technical challenges," and says its ending "has the distinct feeling of a beginning." These five prints are the record of that meeting, and the first entry in what sounds like a longer account.
These four works are available unframed at $1800