Mail Art News #45: An Overview of Cascadia Artpost

 

City of Cascadia central post office (1:87 scale model) by Jack Lattemann

The other day, Cascadian denizen, Nonlocal Variable, suggested that I contact Jack Lattemann, also known as Cascadia Artpost, a name I had seen here and there during my relatively short mail art career of ten years, and so I thought yes that would be great. I'd like to learn more about this mysterious Cascadia Artpost. What is it all about? Jack was super generous in providing information and dozens of images of his creative output, and so I present you with an overview of Cascadia Artpost, plus a few interview questions, followed by the usual weekly mail art news that you've come to expect...nay, demand! 

From Jack Lattemann (JL): 

Between 2008 and 2014, I posted entries on a blog, “Welcome to Cascadia Artpost” (two versions), which provide some background on the first years of Cascadia Artpost. I discontinued the posts in 2014 because they were taking too much of my time, even though I had retired from professional work (public transportation) a couple of years before.

 

My interest in mail art correspondence really began in 2002, when I started using the name “Cascadia Artpost”. I documented this early time in 2008 with the post “First Day of Issue”: 

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21 November 2008

Welcome to the blogsite of Cascadia Artpost. Cascadia Artpost represents the formalization of a personal postal art expression for the northwestern part of the United States and larger region that is my home. In view from Seattle, Washington, at times when the clouds lift is the Cascade Mountain range, extending from the Canadian province of British Columbia to the U.S. state of California. If you are within sight of these beautiful mountains, you can consider yourself in the region of Cascadia. Cascadia is the part of the world I mentally and physically inhabit.

When I was a teenager, I collected postage stamps, and twenty years ago acquired a book on the watercolor artistamps of Donald Evans. However, my own interest in designing artistamps and mail-art began in November 2001, when I was organizing a set of photos from a visit to Latvia and accidentally downsized an image on the computer. The panorama from the 27th floor of Hotel Latvia became an intriguing stamp-sized image. I printed a copy of the image on an inkjet printer. I decided to create a faux Latvian set of stamps to decorate the outside of a surprise birthday package for one of my co-workers.

The result was so well received that I decided to keep experimenting with photos and graphic designs in a stamp format. An internet search introduced me to the term "artistamp," and what has been called "the eternal network" of mail artists. Making artistamps was for me an excellent way to synthesize my personal interests in photography, art and graphic design.

Initially I simply used "Cascadia" or "Cascadiapost" in the corner of stamps I created. In August 2002 I chose the name "Cascadia Artpost" and in January 2003 recorded this name as a member of AML, the Artistamp Mailing List, a loose association of mail artists in the U.S. and Canada.

How have artistamps made a difference in my life? Just like any artistic expression, artistamps reinforce personal self-identity by sharing a vision and ideas with others. I value the contacts and the content of postal exchanges over the years, and especially meeting a few of my correspondents in person. The interplay of postal services and the internet have created an opportunity for a network of global democratic expression among at least those who can afford either postage or have access to a computer connection. It is my fervent hope and prayer that our exchanges can also create occasions that help give voice to the visions and ideas of those who are unable, for various reasons, to contribute to the network.

I'll close with a quote taken from an essay on memory written by an acquaintance in the United Kingdom:

"The fight for a sense of self-identity becomes a fight to make personal memory have a place in the wider social consciousness."

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I had collected stamps as a teenager but not as an adult. However, from the early 1980’s, I discovered stamp art after picking up a book on the life and art of Donald Evans. Around 1988, in a gift shop featuring creations of local artists near the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, I remember buying a packet of faux stamps created by Carl Chew. (I began a personal friendship with Chew many years later in 2010.) In 2001, I discovered on the internet some posts about mail artists such as Anna Banana and Dogfish/Tui Tui (Seattle artist Robert Rudine), and the catalog activities of the late Canadian Michael Bidner. I discovered several sources of perforated paper, bought some, and created a sheet of artistamps from photos I had taken at a kite festival at Grayland, WA, on the Washington coast. I began to send out artistamps and postcards to a few correspondents. In 2009, I purchased my first color laserjet printer. As they say, “One thing led to another.”

 

For a long time I’ve taken photographs. In a previous life, I worked in graphic arts in the 1970’s and dabbled in graphic design, offset printing, watercolors, and pen-and-ink drawing. Mail art seemed an opportunity to integrate all of these interests. I liked the challenge of designing in a very small format like a stamp, and read about stamp design. The democratic, sometimes subversive, non-commercial framework of mail art was a strong attraction for me.

 

Subjects for Cascadia Artpost include the beauties of natural phenomena, the Cascadia region, the locality, and the garden; public events like kite festivals and demonstrations; the ephemeral evidence as documentation and reminders of  daily life; non-globalist socio-political subjects; and, since 2014, scenes from the Cascadia Diorama, a world in 1:87 scale portraying a near future small city named Cascadia and three-dimensional stories about it and its miniature inhabitants called “peeps”. Of course, the diorama contains a miniature central post office whose layout is based generally on the current U.S. post office in Olympia.

The Cascadia Diorama is a representation of a near-future small city in the Cascadian Bioregion, executed in a miniature 1:87 scale, intended to serve as the setting for three-dimensional stories with socio-economic, political, and artistic themes. These themes would be represented in mail art by artistamps, postcards, and occasional zines. Populated by miniature residents called “peeps”, the Cascadia Diorama began to take shape in 2014 and remains an ongoing project, documented in mail art.

Construction began as two panels atop folding tables, each panel 2.0 by 4.0 feet in size and a sandwich of 0.25 inch plywood and sheets of 0.5 inch foam board. In 2019, I added a panel 4.0 feet by 8.0 feet to accommodate additional planned streets and buildings, primarily a Central Post Office and a Grain Terminal. I chose the 1:87 scale due to the wide availability of building kits, scenery, vehicles and other accessories, as this was the most popular scale for the model railroading hobby, though the Cascadia Diorama does not feature any railroad track except for a short spur leading to the Grain Terminal silos, added only in 2020. 

Progress at first was slow, since I had to acquire tools and supplies such as paints, and also learn construction techniques through study of model railroading and diorama “how-to” books. Although a photographer for 30 years, I had to learn new techniques required for photographing miniature scenes. Most importantly, I had to develop a plan on paper to structure the miniature city, which I called Cascadia. I decided on a “north-south” central business street connecting a state highway I called SR-102 (a route number never assigned by the Washington Department of Transportation) and a major east-west street called Broadway. By November 2016, I had completed most of the buildings on both sides of Main Street as well as street and sidewalk sections for both panels. In March 2017, Main Street was completely finished. As the city took form, I realized that structures such as a post office would require one or more additional panels. Despite questions from visitors about “Where is the post office?”, I decided to complete the first two diorama panels before planning and constructing an additional panel which doubled the size of the diorama. This additional panel was not fabricated until November 2019. 

Early features of the diorama included Marnie’s Café on Main Street, a building dedicated to my spouse; erection of Hotel Cascadia, then the tallest building and my first successful experience combining two building kits to form one building, and topped by an FM radio tower for the community radio station KCAX; the Walmarth Cascadia KCAX Community Radio in the Hotel Cascadia store on Main Street, inspired by the U,K.’s Mail Art Martha’s Walmarth store in Retailia, and a farmer’s market. 

A major event that took 6 months of preparation was the staging of a clown parade to celebrate International Clown Week, August 1-7, 2017. In addition to over 60 parading clown figures, I hand-painted over 250 peeps as spectators plus a brigade of police and their vehicles. I recall spending two weeks just to fabricate enough miniature barricades to line both sides of Main Street (six barricade kits involved). For the parade, traffic had to be re-routed over Main Street. After thoroughly documenting the event, the cleanup took almost a month as I had to store all the participants for future urban activities, and repair and resurface Main Street which had been left in a pockmarked condition by the paraders, crowds, and cops. The City of Cascadia is not sure it would agree to closing Main Street again for a parade. 

After the election of Trump as U.S. President in 2016, I contemplated a satirical project for the diorama that would call attention to the peculiarities and picadillos of the new regime, In 2017, I acquired a book about the German Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell and his automobile sculptures, and began to imagine a defunct automobile dealership in miniature and inspired by Vostell that I decided to call “Dada Trumph Motors” (DTM). I wanted a statue of Trump for the front of this facility, and after much internet searching, found an Israeli ceramics dealer advertising Trump salt shakers for $25 U.S. plus $5 shipping. The size of this artifact was a perfect height for the 1:87 scale world, and after sealing and repainting, became the icon for DTM.

Dada Trumph Motors took shape during the summer of 2018 as I planned its first fall exhibition. I crafted plastic boxes I called coffins into which I poured modeling plaster around various miniature vehicles that mimicked various types of Vostell auto sculptures. Murals of Trump family and cabinet members lined the periphery of the DTM Art Park (Trump was identified simply as “Ruler”). The Art Park even featured a set of “Golden Throne” lavatories for visitors, with “All proceeds fertilize the DTM Art Park”. DTM’s first exhibition opened on 14 October 2018, and was commemorated in mail art with artistamps, postcards, and a zine. Dada Trumph Motors remains perhaps the most notorious feature of the Cascadia Diorama. 

In June 2019, a City Hall Campus opened across from Dada Trumph Motors, thereby completing the last construction on the original two panels of the diorama. During the rest of 2019, I developed a plan for expanding the diorama to double its size, acquired three building kits to combine for the Central Post Office whose layout was roughly patterned after the Olympia Post Office in downtown Olympia, and fabricated the additional panel to double the size of Cascadia city. 

By February 2020, I had completed the front of the Post Office and its Postal Plaza feature displaying mail art received by Cascadia Artpost, and staged a celebration of Anna Banana’s birthday that was documented in mail art. The entire Central Post Office complex opened in May 2020. Specially painted Cascadia Post vans, modeled after older and newer vehicles of the U.S. Postal Service, were a whole separate construction project that I completed before the actual post office buildings were fabricated.

In parallel with the construction of the post office, I completed the “Worker-Owned, Worker Managed” Grain Terminal in spring 2020, served by single-track railroad spur and featuring two grain hopper cars in rainbow colors plus a switcher engine of the Cascadia National Railway, a publicly owned entity. The Grain Terminal will be the subject of documentation in a Diorama Diaries zine later in 2023. 

In December 2022, the last empty quadrant of the additional diorama panel was filled by the DKA Gallery & Printing complete in homage to long-time mail art correspondent Darlene Altschul of DKA Post, a memorial park honoring Darlene Altschul’s late spouse Mike Altschul, and two five-story residential towers. 

The Cascadia Diorama has now reached its ultimate size, but more stories remain to be told from this miniature world. In addition to the story of the Grain Terminal, I think Dada Trumph Motors has potential to host at least one more exhibition. The Postal Plaza at the Central Post Office will continue to host rotating displays of mail art received by Cascadia Artpost. One or two buildings along Main Street might be replaced by newer construction. I’ve decided that the peeps residing in Cascadia will help determine of future course of their community. Of course, suggestions are always welcome from mail art’s Eternal Network.

The Coffee Clutch newsletter blends reality and fiction

Current projects include:

 

• “Ticket! Ticket!” – A collaborative, ongoing project since 2017 in which correspondents send tickets and other ephemera of daily life, originals or modified, which are then turned into sheets of artistamp images and subsequently sent out to each participant whose contribution appears on a sheet.

• “American Values” – A broad umbrella category for projects such as artistamps of current American Oligarchs (mostly billionaires) and the follies of attempts to preserve American hegemony in the world.

• “Diorama Diaries” – Occasional zines and postcards illustrating scenes and narratives of the Cascadia Diorama.

• “Dada Trumph Motors” – An ongoing venue within the diorama (since 2017) to comment upon and satirize U.S. political life, in the form of artistamps, postcards, and occasional zines.

• Spontaneous projects that might originate in something I’ve read about or photographed; example: a discarded envelope “cancelled” by a tire tread that I saw on the shoulder of a local street during a walk, that later became a postcard titled “Cancelled Mail”.

Thomas Brown (TB): What is your favorite type of mail art to receive? 

JL: My favorite type of incoming mail art is the artistamp. That form is what originally attracted me to mail art. I have collected all the artistamps I have received over the years (sheets, individual stamps, and a few envelopes and postcards) in a set of 9 looseleaf binders, my Artistamp Archive that I placed four years ago in our home library as a means to show friends and visitors who ask what mail art is all about.

Separately, I have a set of 13 Lindner (German manufacturer of stamp albums) slipcase blank stamp albums with acid-free full-sheet slip pages containing two sheets of every artistamp created as Cascadia Artpost since the beginning. The second most complete collection of Cascadia Artpost is housed at Artpool in Budapest, Hungary. (Attached tis a photo showing part of the Artistamp archive with our cat Bud).

You may be wondering whether / how I save every piece of incoming mail art over the years. For a long time I separated out the artistamps from other incoming mail art. Two years ago at the end of 2021, the accumulation of 20 years had grown to 12 covered, very full, plastic tubs along one wall of our basement and I was faced with purchasing several more tubs for the coming year’s mail. I reached a decision that I did not want to just store stuff I hardly would look through again, and thought of a way to scale back. Arbitrarily, I decided to keep a maximum of 5 plastic covered tubs:

• 1 tub for the coming year’s mail;
• 2 tubs for what I arbitrarily decided were exceptional creations of various types, and a sentimental category of everything produced by a few long-time correspondents, a few of whom have passed; and
• 2 tubs of the previous two calendar years’ accumulation of mail art, unsorted.

The rest I disposed of in our weekly city recycling bin collected every two weeks. This amounted to the equivalent of one full bin that took me a month to dispose of. Every year in January, I will go through the storage tub from two years ago and decided what to keep and what to recycle. Eventually, I might have to add a 6^th tub, but that represents a much slower growth rate, and an archive not so large that I can’t revisit the contents periodically.

TB: Who are some mail artists that impress you lately? 

JL: Some mail artists who have impressed me (there are many – here is a quick list):

• Darlene Altschul (CA)
• C.T. Chew (WA)
• Robbie Rudine aka Dogfish/Tui Tui (WA)
• Steve Smith (FL)
• Jennie Hinchcliff (CA)
• Sally Wassink (CA)
• DA Ward (TX)
• Ficus Strangulensis (WV)
• Test Tower (WA – passed)
• Adam Roussopoulos (MN)
• Carol Stetser (AZ)
• Sticker Dude aka Joel Cohen (NY)
• RCBz (MN)
• Anna Banana (BC CANADA)
• Jas Felter (BC CANADA)
• Ed Varney (BC CANADA)
• Mailarta (BC CANADA)
• Theo Nelson (AB CANADA)
• Orlando Nelson Pacheco Acuña (CHILE)
• Clemente Padín (URUGUAY)
• Samuel Montalvetti (ARGENTINA)
• Fernando García Delgado (ARGENTINA)
• María Inés Esteves (ARGENTINA)
• Alan Turner (UK)
• Mail Art Martha aka Martha Aitchison (UK)
• Bubblegum Dada Corporation (UK)
• Alan Brignull aka Adanaland (UK)
• Jürgen Olbrich (GERMANY)
• Patrizia Cacciaguerra aka TIC TAC (GERMANY)
• Frips (BELGIUM)
• Vittore Baroni (ITALY)
• Roberto Formigoni (ITALY)
• Henry Denander (SWEDEN)
• Maria Nekrasova (RUSSIA)
• Alexander Limarev (RUSSIA)
• Fraenz Frisch (LUXEMBOURG)
• Peter Kaufmann (SWITZERLAND – passed)
• RYOSUKE COHEN (JAPAN)
• Vizma Bruns (AUSTRALIA)

TB: What would you like to see more of in the mail art community? 

JL: What would I like to see more of in the mail art community?

• More mail art with socio-political themes
• More satire
• More postal oddities
• More artistamps!

🌎   ✉️   🌍   ✉️   🌏   ✉️   🌎   ✉️   🌍   ✉️   🌏   ✉️

Mail Art Review for 7/12/2023

USPS postal rates went up again. Blah blah. What are ya gonna do? Can you see the price of one Forever Stamp going up to $1.00? I can. Keep on Mailing. I mailed some chair illustrations from an architectural reference book to Joey Patrickt.  I ***might*** re-start my MidJourney AI account for a little while, so I can make some AI generated images of mail art, including people sending and receiving mail art...maybe some AI artistamps. Could be good! Also, getting some envelopes ready to go out. 

outgoing envelope art by T. Brown

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I hereby issue a clarification based on the following reader feedback for Mail Art News #40: the Zoom Mail Art Group (ZMAG) is not a secret group.  My use of the word "secret" was intended to arouse curiosity levels. The writing at Mail Art News is sometimes playful and creative. 

To the Editor: 

What a delight to see the ZMAG website in a recent Mail Art News. Thank you so much! We are happy to get the word out about this little group. Notably, however, ZMAG is NOT a SECRET group! Quite the contrary! ZMAG is open to all interested mail artists who want to participate as space allows--Just use the email on the website to obtain an invitation. It's easy! Thank you again for highlighting this dynamic group, now celebrating 3 years of regular meetings!  --Coco Muchmore, ZMAG member

And thanks Coco M. for giving me the idea to look up mail art on Wikipedia. I'm frequently looking things up there, but somehow forgot to do a search for mail art. Hmmm...though...they need a list of notable mail artists. As Coco pointed out though, Anna Banana and Ginny Lloyd do have Wikipedia articles, so who else is on there? If you have links to mail artists on Wikipedia, email them to me at mailartnews@gmail.com. Here's Ray Johnson, Chuck Welch, and Blaster Al Ackerman for starters. 

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Speaking of mail art rock stars, here's an article I found about a mail artist who sends / sent rocks in the mail. Mail art rocks!

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Monster A Go-Go is blogging (7/9/2023)

outgoing works by Monster A Go-Go (above and below)

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Mail art blogger and vlogger Pam Chatfield is blogging and vlogging.

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With reports coming in to the Mail Art News Central Headquarters Main Office that the Chinese are counterfeiting US postage stamps, it might be time to bring Mr. Zap out of retirement. From the National Postal Museum's account on Instagram: This hand puppet had a brief but lively career with the United States Postal Inspection Service. Elwood P. Zap, AKA Mr. Zap, was a reformed legendary villain who toured the country sharing his first-hand knowledge of postal crimes. Mr. Zap urged his audiences to be vigilant against potential criminal activity such as mail fraud, mail theft, and mail room security.

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Oh, and I found an article by Chuck Welch, titled Mail Art in Cyberspace, as I was finishing up this post, so I will have to include more about that in a future Mail Art News post. And we'll need to look more into the work of Donald Evans (1945-1977).

Donald Evans

Donald Evans

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