Both my studio and publishing practices move between solitude and togetherness. Making is a form of processing and feeling less alone. But it is the relationships and collaborations that come in waves and are among the most meaningful parts of life.

My studio practice is rigorous, largely analog, and performed in solitude. I make layered works on paper that blur the distinctions between figure and ground through the application or extrusion of patterns such as stripes, checks, polka dots, and plaids. I’m really interested in how different logics of the patterns meet at the lines of the original drawing and create a more abstracted image. Color systems and scale are used to further obscure the figure and change the reading at different distances. My source material includes film stills, advertising, family archive, and personal photography, with a particular attention to how figures relate to one another, the setting, and clothing. Through hand drawn methods, I’m interested in how these works simultaneously describe, obscure, flatten, and blend the figures within the scene.

The work draws from my interest in gender as something constructed through images, relationships, and performance. Influenced by 20th- and 21st-century visual culture, fashion, and cinema, I consider how gender identity is absorbed and repeated through everyday imagery and behavior. The work is also informed by grief and forms of becoming, including loss of people, relationships, and former versions of the self. These experiences create a heightened awareness of time and impermanence that informs identity and non-binary expression.

My publishing practice is also slow and attentive, resulting in a handmade book art magazine release every two years with images and information about artist and writers work. This work is collaborative, where I’m interested in using handmade book arts techniques to add further meaning to people’s work to share it with people in an accessible and unique way. Through both of these practices my hope is to create meaning for both myself and the viewer.

Ray Seebeck is an artist and publisher based in the Detroit, Michigan area. They received a BFA in Print Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. Their early work focused on experimental drawing and book arts. In 2021, while living in New York, they founded Magazine TM, an independent biennial art magazine highlighting artists through handmade book arts, now in its third release. From 2022–2025, while working at Free Range in Chicago, they produced over 50 woodcut prints mostly exploring landscapes, along with two magazine editions. Currently, they teach printmaking workshops at Signal-Return in Detroit while pursuing an MFA in Print Media at Cranbrook focusing on blurring the lines between figure and ground relationship in printmaking and installation.