Event Programming 2025
+ Special Projects
Panel Talks & Discussions
At the Gallery Room
Love is the Drug: A Film Screening and Book Production Discussion
3:30PM to 4:15PM
Moderated by Zach Clark, National Monument Press
Heather Edney is a first wave harm reductionist and drug user organizer. Love Is The Drug is a short film by Liz Roberts, combining Heather's archive of community health education ephemera with contemporary 16mm footage filmed in Santa Cruz. Sucking Dick for Syringes is a collection of personal texts by Heather, published by National Monument Press. This program will include a screening of the film, followed by a discussion about the creation of multiple projects through cross media collaboration.
Off the Wall—On the Page—Artist Books and Publishing Across Contexts
11:00AM to 12:15PM
Mathew Timmons, Insert Press
How do artist books, project-based publications, and ephemeral or experimental print editions emerge from exhibition contexts and interdisciplinary practices? Drawing on Insert Press’s publishing history and gallery space, General Projects, Mathew Timmons will discuss how publications function as extensions of exhibitions—reframing installations, archiving performances, and producing stand-alone works that circulate beyond the gallery. The presentation will highlight recent artist books, collaborative editions, and small-run experimental formats, showing how publishing can serve as both documentation and artistic medium, curatorial and creative practice. The talk will include a Q&A about the possibilities of print in contemporary art contexts..
Print Past, Present, and Future
2:00PM to 3:15PM
Moderated by Allyson Healey, Sr. Permanent Collections Researcher and Manager of Archives, Santa Barbara Museum of Art
In an increasingly digitized world, print's inherently analog nature can sometimes make it seem like a retro curiosity. For many printers and print lovers, however, it's that physicality and connection to history that are what make print so engaging. This panel will discuss the ways in which contemporary print and publishing practices are enriched by their grounding in historical processes and imagery. How do artists call upon print's past to create its present and future? And which motifs and methods are ripe for revitalization?
Panelists:
Matthew Austin, For the Birds Trapped in Airports
Harry Reese, Turkey Press
Madeline Helland, Aviatrix Press
Defining, Defending, and Dreaming Santa Barbara’s Visual Culture
12:30PM to 1:45PM
Moderated by Alex Lukas, Associate Professor of Print & Publication, Department of Art, University of California, Santa Barbara
This panel brings together a group of engaged local artists, educators, and organizers to discuss how we see the aesthetics of our city and how we are seen. By exploring and questioning dominant tropes of what artistic practices look like on the Central Coast, this roundtable will examine what is, what is missing, what has been forgotten, and what’s next in Santa Barbara’s contemporary artistic landscape. Part history lesson, part introspection, part call to action, this conversation asks what is next for visual culture in Santa Barbara?
Panelists:
Frederick Janka & Dalia Garcia, Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art
Madeleine Ignon, The Paint Rag & Beta Epochs
Michael Montenegro, @chicanoculturesb
Special Projects:
Spore Space: A Scarecrow's Sculpture Garden
Rodrigo Ormachea & Elizabeth Herring
For Off Register 2025 Spore Space will be presenting a collaborative installation by artists Rodrigo Ormachea and Elizabeth Herring. Both artists will be combining their skills in photography, sculpture, and storytelling to produce A Scarecrow's Sculpture Garden. The installation will encompass 3 or 4 sculpture works favoring assembled construction with found objects and ceramics, riso printed materials for sale, and soft sculpture. The theme draws from Herring's existing scarecrow-making practice with material additions in ceramic drawing from Ormachea's sculpture practice. The installation will be large enough for a handful of people to walk in and around and will allow viewers to read through the narrative of the installation which culminates in a printed collaborative riso zine project that viewers can purchase as a souvenir from the experience. https://sporespace.net/
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FKA CA53776V2.gallery
FKA CA53776V2.gallery is a new iteration of Alex Lukas's dashboard exhibition space, CA53776V2.gallery. The original project was an experimental curatorial platform housed in a 2007 Ford Ranger perpetually parked on the 300 block of West Anapamu Street from 2021 through 2023; programming focused on the intersection of intimacy, touch, and craft on, in, and around the American road. The "space" closed when four of the Ranger's six engine cylinders began perpetually misfiring. For Off Register, Lukas has reprised the project on the roof of a 2023 Subaru Outback with a curated selection of oversized bumper stickers displayed in the dubious lineage of "World's Largest" roadside attractions. https://ca53776v2.gallery/
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Rolling Roaster: Rest Stop
The Rolling Roaster is a queer centered art project space based out of a mobile kitchen island.The Rolling Roaster began as a mutual aid center in UCSB’s art department, with free coffee, snacks, and menstrual products. It has served waffles for the Santa Barbara community and housed a fortune telling puppet at Other Places Art Fair. At Off Register, the Roaster becomes Rest Stop, a lesbian bar and print media library inspired by historic lesbian and queer meeting places-- bars and bookstores-- many of which have not stood the test of time.
