Rising Stars: Meet Jordan Carr of Tower East/ Union Hill

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Carr.

Hi Jordan, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
While Oddities Prints as a for-hire print shop has existed for just over 10 years, Oddities Prints began as an entity about 5 years prior. In those early days, Oddities Prints took the form of a two-person poster printing entity consisting of Jordan Carr and Danni Parelman. We were honing our craft while making screen printed posters & record covers for the underground music scene. We approached all of these projects with an art-first mindset, letting technique be guided by the intricacies of each piece.

Demand grew and our desire to work outside of the art-industry waned! During this time, Jordan & Danni were (in addition to working multiple jobs while printing after hours) rehabbing a 120 year old building at 31st & Cherry in KCMO. Vacant since 1986, this building would become the home of Oddities Prints as we know it.

The leap into for-hire print services was natural for Jordan, having worked in the print industry for many years prior while Danni’s path moved her away from printmaking through Oddities, and into the world of heavy metal tattooing.

Through the ten years of Oddities Prints as we know it, the shop has filled a large void in the printing industry. This gap is that between commercial print services and fine-art printmaking. With one foot in both world, Oddities has been able to serve as a liaison between the two. We’ve carved a living and a career out of being the commercial shop for the fine-art world, and the fine-art shop for the commercial world.

Voted best screen printing service in Kansas City, Oddities is on press every day printing shirts, artist-editions, posters, music industry ephemera. We’ve also begun offering unique techniques such as silkscreen on glass, silkcreen on cylindrical objects, fuzzy-flocked blacklight posters, ceramic vessels, three-dimensional objects and more.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Ad Astra Per Aspera! We’ve grown every year, though each year brings a new round of growing pains. Our approach has had to shift based on our environment, and being able to adapt has proven to be a strong point. Sometimes we’re so busy that we cannot see the end of the calendar. In those times, it’s been valuable for us to still make sure we’ve got time for art-making and creative endeavors. Prioritizing client’s in-hands date, we can still get everything done in time AND make sure we’re putting new creative projects out into the world.

During the early days of Covid, our ability to adapt led us to printing and publishing a suite of 20 different Risograph art prints. This project constituted our Mutual Aid Print Edition. During the summer of 2020, we coordinated with 20 artist to bring this to life. Sales from each print were split into three directions; to the artist, to our print shop, and to a number of DIY and under-funded art spaces in Kansas City. Our goal was to pay rent for as many art spaces in KC as possible for at least a little while. It was a success!

Typical small business hurdles have come our way, but we’ve always approached them with the big… really big picture. If a need or opportunity arises for us to move in a new printing press, then we’re moving in the best, fastest, most controllable press out there. At our slowest, our machinery is overkill. At our busiest, we can quickly and easily keep up. At our most creative, we’ve got the keys to best presses and tools we could ask for.

Starting without a business loan, but constantly reinvesting in ourself has worked well for us so far!

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Our specialty is living in that gap between the commercial print world and the fine-art print world. Personally, I (Jordan) get the most satisfaction out of bringing other artist’s work to life. Our shop loves this challenge, our fuzzy-flocked screen printed poster printing is a great example, as well as silkscreen on cylindrical glass. When we feel that something is cool, and would work well for a particular artist, our goal is to figure out how to make it, how to make it repeatable, and how to fit it into a professional workflow at professional quality. When a crazy project comes our way, we want to master it. This allows us to offer that service to any type of artist moving forward.

This approach is largely vacant in the art-printing world. We’re really proud of mastering so many strange techniques. Not only do they open the door to future unique projects, this approach levels up the quality of our day-to-day print jobs to an exponential degree. We’ll be running a shirt press, for example, at high speed, executing complicated multi-color prints in which inks overlap one another to create extra tones, all under the watchful eye of fine-art printmakers. It’s the best of both worlds! Can art prints be made at commercial speeds and efficiencies? Yes! Can commercial prints be made to the same degree of quality and creative technique as a fine-art printmaking specialist? Also yes!

What are your plans for the future?
Our future plans are to keep growing in the most sustainable way possible. We want to expand our quiver of artist clientele while growing our own art-editioning wing. Think of this like a record-label for visual art! While our days are filled with job printing and designing, our minds swim with ideas and collaborations we’d like to see out in the world.

We want to print everything.

Pricing:

• Our pricing is industry standard!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.odditiesprints.com
• Instagram: oddities_prints