disclaimer: written december 2006! still mostly relevant though.
disclaimer spring 2010: this is pretty out-of-date... but possibly interesting?
here's where to find some updated rationales & explanations!
...a web site?
I am trying to make my living making screenprints and working on buildings. Right now, I'm not employed by anybody, so any money that's coming in is from poster design commissions and people buying posters. I would much rather have people buy posters from me than from an art gallery: most galleries will charge the buyer twice as much for a piece of art, and then take half of that money to pay themselves. This is pretty legitimate -- most art galleries do a lot of work to promote and represent the artists whose work they show -- but it also means that someone besides the creator is making money off their work, that the stakes are higher, and that speculation is encouraged by the gallery owners. To the extent that I can, I would rather place myself outside the gallery system, and deal directly with the people who want copies of my prints and posters.
So, even though I have an affinity for Luddism, and a tendency to embrace obsolete materials and methods, a web site seems to be the best way to let people who are interested in my work find out more about it, and buy copies of posters if they want. Real life contact, of course, is always preferable: get in touch, come and visit.
...screenprints about buildings?
I started out building blanket forts and sand castles; ended up studying architecture, then later, hanging drywall in un-permitted renovation projects. My junior year of school, I moved way off campus, figured out how to screenprint, and began making posters and flyers. Since I finished school, I've been printing posters and teaching screenprinting, as well as drawing kitchen layouts for my friends, helping build a barn, and constructing a cardboard city with elementary school kids.
The "everyday spaces" project allows me to combine my work on buildings with my work on screenprinted graphics: I am exploring and presenting ideas that I first addressed in my architecture-school thesis, at the same time as I am pushing and refining silkscreen practices and techniques. It's exciting.
...sell subscriptions?
There is something of a tradition, which I have just begun to find out about, of using subscriptions to fund printing projects, radical projects, and radical printing projects. Small farmers all over the US use Community Supported Agriculture subscriptions to make their local, organic farms financially viable and stable. Dissident Mexican printers in the early part of the 20th century distributed posters by subscription, funding their revolutionary graphic production while supplying subscribers with political flyers to paste up or hand out. Edward Bellamy, in his 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward, details a similar procedure for how newspapers and magazines may be published, by people collecting funds together yearly, and subsidizing the printing costs and the salary of the editors.
It's also a way for me to give myself deadlines, and be accountable to other people for my own work. It means I'm not just trying to work my own ideas in among the demands of people who commission me to make posters. It's a chance to be compensated for making my own work, without having to make things on speculation, and without asking for governmental or institutional money. And it's a way to get my prints and my ideas out into the world, beyond the group of people I already know.