Date: January 4th 2008

So it's been six months or so since Original Multiples sent out an email. Many of you have never gotten one. But now it's been a year of Original Multiples in its new look and for half that time it's said "summer vacation." So I thought for the new year I'd explain.

In January of 2007, I went out to Los Angeles to help David Ellis with an installation. He asked what had happened to Original Multiples, encouraged me to end the three-year hiatus, take a pile of prints from his flat files and see what could be done to trickle them out into the world. Ideally, we'd make enough for his studio rent and mine, since mine is free. It was worth buying flat files myself, registering with the city, and making a website. Vest of all my housemates were printmakers and we had fun evenings Gocco printing business cards.

About the middle of the year, I was curating small shows at a community space. In the course of a month driving a van up and down the east coast, I moved to New York. Round-trip turned into a one-way. A couple weeks later, I drove back to Virginia, packed the OM inventory, repainted my house, rented it to a radical teacher and a landscape architecture student, locked my studio, and headed north again.

Around October, Swoon handed me a pile of prints and told me to raise money for her summer boat project, the Miss Rockaway Armada. In December she took me to Bethlehem to see the Santa's Ghetto shop that Pictures on Walls put together. The whole web part of OM had been a conceptual lark to curate something like what they do, but in ways that play with copies and originals, shipping and sales.

We at OM don't want a thousand emails about prints. We want to make goofy things that are sweet and small and sincere. We like wrapping presents and city walks to the post office. Meeting the mailman.

So, today there's a new, small Swoon print up, but it's on justseeds.org The money from this one will go towards starting a free school in Pennsylvania. The print are selling is one half of the edition. The other half is also printed two color and also coffee-stained and also in an edition of 250, but the main color is Orange instead of Blue. It will be on Just Seeds soon, once these are sold and shipped out.

Finally, let me suggest that if you go no to justseeds.org and are making a purchase and jetfuel is burned to deliver you one thing which may or may not bring you long-held happiness and good fortune that you take a look at the grossly under-priced prints by Kristine Virsis, new edition prints by Stain, and the very articulate books and writings and blogs of Josh McPhee.

Thank you,

Max / OM
originalmultiples.com / 434 336 4381