Tortilla Press : Juan Cisneros Neumann

Tortilla Press
a publishing idea put together in between conceptual subjugations. 2021 marks its humble beginnings after its pupal period, hoping for a digestional fulfillment.

Tortilla Press utilizes the newspaper format as an abandoned medium floating in the limbo of existence. The content collected inside the papers consists of material upcycled from public visual media (both Canadian and International), historical footage, comic books, documentary films, motion pictures, cell phone videos, screengrabs, art books, YouTube and pretty much any visual material that is available at the Vancouver Public Library.

The project as a publishing idea looks to incorporate into local Canadian art the language of rejection, irrelevance and the use of localized information as a means of constructing new understandings and explore possible ramifications of meaning within local communities.

The idea of Tortilla Press comes into fruition at heart inside the yearly Vancouver Art Book Fair. In a way the press originated during a "Zoom" call at the book fair as a response to its surrounding publishing establishments.

This website serves as a document of the process at its current stage in time. The work developed within this yearly publication effort is shared with local university students on a yearly basis. This effort is facilitated under the umbrella of artist Lucie Chan and passionate animator and character designer Juan Carlos López de la Torre.

Tortilla Press and its efforts are produced inside the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. The name of Vancouver, British Columbia and Canada represent a problematic history of the land and do not take into account the people who still inhabit this land since before European occupation.

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You can read about Tortilla Press in the following links, many thanks to Migration Press @ Light Factory Publications
for the article, and to Libby Leshgold Galery for the invitation to participate in Out of Bounds:

https://lightfactorypublications.ca/rml-mail-art/the-grapes-of-steinbeck/

https://libby.ecuad.ca/exhibitions/2022/out-of-bounds.html

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Links:

Lucie Chan, Juan Carlos López de la Torre, Chris Jung, Vancouver Public Library, Vancouver Art Book Fair, Capilano University, Emily Carr University of Art and Design

cover by: Chris Jung
cover by: Lucie Chan