Emerge’s INK! Print Rally invites guests through portal into another dimension

When talking to Rylan Wood with EquipmentShare about why she wanted to rent an asphalt roller, Jeni Riplinger, executive director of Emerge, had to explain herself twice.

Wood’s confusion was understandable. After all, it’s not everyday that someone needs an asphalt roller for an art project.

Now in its ninth year, Emerge’s INK! Print Rally invites printmakers to carve large wooden panels, 3-by-4 or 4-by-5, which are then printed onto fabric via an asphalt roller.

This year’s INK! Print Rally will take over the street in front of Emerge in Coeur d’Alene on Saturday.

The idea of INK! Print Rally was born a decade ago during a conversation between Riplinger and artist Hanna Kuhns, who told Riplinger she’d seen printmaking events featuring asphalt rollers advertised online.

Around the same time, Riplinger met Reinaldo Gil Zambrano and the pair chatted about Riplinger’s goals with Emerge. She brought up the large-scale printmaking events Kuhns told her about, and Zambrano mentioned he had helped put a similar event together while a student at the University of Idaho.

He was also friends with James Bailey, a professor in the School of Visual and Media Arts at the University of Montana, who had hosted a similar printmaking event for years. Zambrano helped Riplinger develop the event, and INK! Print Rally has celebrated large-scale printmaking ever since.

“I think printmaking is greatly underappreciated,” Riplinger said. “It’s so complex and takes several different skill sets to master printmaking, so to be able to create this event where we can do it on a giant scale and really show the public how intricate it really is, that was exciting to us.”

This year’s rally features art from Mickenzie Burns, Carole Matteri, Molly Klingler, Nate Gilchrist, Willow Tree, Griffon Selby, KJ Elmose, Ezra Tickemyer and Ky Little, Chloe Howell, Madeline E. Goolie, Robin Graf Dorsey, Aimee Valentine, Jen Erickson, Ryan Hamm, Brian Achenbaugh, Jill McFarlane and Katelyn Burdette.

Riplinger said it’s never been a challenge convincing artists to participate as it’s a special opportunity to create large-scale prints that many studios aren’t necessarily equipped to handle.

Artists will arrive at the event with carved panels. They will help each other ink the boards and position the fabric just right before the asphalt roller makes a print. Riplinger said it takes between 35 and 40 minutes to print two artists, with each artist creating two prints.

“It’s very dramatic and so rewarding to watch,” Riplinger said.

The resulting prints are then available for purchase with some artists choosing to show their work at Emerge’s October gallery exhibit. Pricing depends on the artist but typically starts around $350.

Each rally features a theme. Past events have featured the themes “Dichotomy,” “Evolution,” “Underground” and “Things That Go Bump in the Night: Monsters, Creatures and Urban Legends.”

The theme of this year’s event is “Portals.” On the INK! Print Rally page on the Emerge website, there are several definitions of the word listed, including “a doorway, gate or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one” and “a communicating part or area of an organism, specifically the point at which something (such as a pathogen) enters the body.”

“Portals” was chosen because, at the beginning of the year, the Emerge team liked the idea of traveling through a portal to another place.

“We always try to choose a theme that can be interpreted many, many different ways,” Riplinger said. “It’s so fun to see how each artist explores that. You might have one artist that is exploring a very literal or maybe the most common interpretation, and then another artist where it’s very abstract and something that causes you to pause and think. It’s a really fun thing when you know the theme and you’re looking at all the prints and trying to figure out how they got there.”

This year marks the first in which the number of applicants was higher than the number of spaces available. The group features both those new to INK! Print Rally and those who have participated in years past.

Riplinger advises community members to keep their eyes on next year’s event, which marks a decade of INK! Print Rally, as many alum will return.

As the number of participating artists has grown, so too has the event overall. This year, the rally features a vendor market created in partnership with 33 Artists Market founder Gwyn Pevonka, who sells jewelry in Yours, Emerge’s retail space.

The vendor market will feature Art by Annaka, Angel Teeth, Katie Frey, Some Threads, Adorn Handcrafted Jewelry, Sarah Louise Windisch, R&P Paperie, Casting Glass Stones, Nomadic Knots, Messenger Moth Studio, Nadia Hitchcock, Cat & Crow Studio, Stinko Studios, Spokane Print and Publishing Co., Cinda Rae Creates, Bonez and Buggs, Katie Rose Pottery, Charles Ayars Photography, Heidi Barnett Art Organic Pointillism and Greyson Hatcher Art.

There will also be food trucks, a beer garden, live music and interactive activities.

“Through the years, we’ve built it into a big family friendly community event where the public can come down and hang out with us for the day,” Riplinger said.