Michelle Vaughan produced “100 Tweets” from September 2010 – June 2011. This is a hand typeset letterpress project printed at The Arm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For “100 Tweets”, Vaughan spent months combing her Twitter feed in search of 100 comments which fit into her vision of the project as a whole. In the beginning, she collected snarky, throw-away tweets mostly centered on banal and mundane comments. This eventually evolved into a more personal project, as she looked for tweets which mirrored her own opinions and thoughts, but were well-executed by the author. “100 Tweets” also records pockets of time and history in short observations.

Vaughan says that the process “was laborious but satisfying.” She followed a strict formal layout and borrowed artist Gerhard Richter’s method of selecting random colors for his grid paintings. The colors in “100 Tweets” were generated via the website random.org, and no two are alike. Colors were grouped together in tones. The yin to Twitter’s high-tech speed is the yang of hand typesetting, it can be long and slow. All together “100 Tweets” hit over 250 hours on the press.

The editions were intended to be extremely small. Just a few offerings for those who nerd-out on type, letterpress, Twitter, snark and perhaps appreciate the art of a nicely written tweet.

About the Artist

Michelle Vaughan creates drawings, paintings and hand-set letterpress; her works often extend into urban or public art.

Her figurative and text-based art series share a focus on the patterns which can be found in world history and current events, and the way those patterns are communicated.

In 2009, the public project “Sea Warriors” was installed throughout the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. Eleven historical pirates were reproduced on 64 canvas flags and hung on to vintage lampposts. The installation included a giant timeline made from vinyl silhouettes, as well as window displays of imagery and historical information. This temporary project was on view to thousands of people on a daily basis.

Vaughan’s work has been featured in the NY Post, Reuters, Huffington Post, AOL, 20×200 and Hyperallergic. Her work was also recently included in Elle Décor’s Modern Life Concept House in Manhattan. In 2011, her “100 Tweets” project was featured in a video on Reuters.com.

Vaughan received fiscal sponsorship for the project “Sea Warriors” from the New York Foundation of the Arts. She earned a Bachelor’s of Art degree from UCLA, where she studied under Henry Hopkins, Paul McCarthy and Lari Pittman. She has lived in the Lower East Side in New York for over 15 years.