OOO Press: A System of Iteration

Installation
Graduate Thesis Exhibition
UIC Year End Show, May 2026

OBJECTS: 25 total
PUBLICATIONS: 8, risograph, unique bindings editions of 35-60
PRINTS: risograph / letterpress / linoleum editions of 35-200
PRODUCTION: design, print, bind — in-house
STRUCTURES: raw lumber + plywood (6' H x 3' W x 2.5' D) For UIC's 2026 Year End Show, I staged the grand opening of a working press — building out the gallery as a functioning studio and point of sale rather than a display of finished objects. Two structures anchored the space: a two-sided shelving unit presenting eight risograph publications (35–60 unit editions, each hand-bound with a unique structure) alongside a run of prints in risograph, letterpress, and linoleum relief (35–200 unit editions); and a working station, built to match my actual studio setup, outfitted with a cutting mat, binding tools, carving and cutting tools, and the reference material that shaped the work. Both structures were built from raw lumber frames and plywood, 6' tall × 3' wide × 2.5' deep — construction left visibly unfinished, joints and grain exposed, nothing sanded or painted to hide what it's made of.

That rawness was the point. The structures never pretend to be neutral — they look built, not bought, and they hold work that's the opposite: bound, trimmed, editioned, finished by hand to a print-shop standard. The unglamorous mechanics of making sit in plain view right next to the object that mechanics produced. A press isn't a clean room; it's a workshop that happens to also be a storefront, and the install refused to disguise either half.

The install argued a simple point: an independent press has to do two things at once — make the work and sell the work — and most exhibitions only show one. Splitting the gallery into workstation and shelf made both visible simultaneously: labor and inventory, process and product, raw structure and finished object, in the same room, at the same time.

All 25 pieces were designed, produced, and bound in-house.

Bodies of Time

Artist Book
OOO Press
2025

EDITION: 35
STRUCTURE: 8-panel accordion fold (4" folded / 36" unfolded)
PAPER: Arches cold-press, 100% cotton, 140lb
PROCESS: monotype from reclaimed risograph masters
TEXT: original poem
ROLE: writing, printmaking, binding
 An accordion-fold artist book, 8 panels, unfolding from a 4-inch pocket edition to a 36-inch continuous sequence. Made during a class at Ox-Bow School of Art, the book pairs an original poem with monotypes pulled from discarded Risograph masters — spent printing plates repurposed as ink surfaces, leaving ghost impressions of the Ox-Bow campus embedded in the work itself.

Printed on Arches cold-press cotton, chosen for its tooth and stiffness — the paper won't sit fully closed. Even at rest, the book stays slightly open, refusing containment.

The structure is the argument: memory doesn't open flat. It unfolds in sequence, reveals itself only through handling, and leaves its own residue behind — the same way the discarded masters carry a trace of every page they printed before this one.

One of eight publications presented in A System of Iteration, OOO Press's thesis exhibition.

Weaving As Inquiry

Research Portfolio
2025

FORMS: exhibition, code, textile, publication
CODE: p5.js — 5 preset weave structures + randomized pattern generation
TEXTILE: 3 hand-woven swatches, embroidery floss, ~6" H, 2-5" W
PUBLICATION: 8 x 10", 27 spreads, coil-bound folio
ROLE: research, code, weaving An investigation into material logic and digital logic within the practice of weaving, carried across four forms — research, code, textile, and publication — to test where each logic breaks down against the other.

The project began as a research trip to Textile Manifestos: From Bauhaus to Soft Sculpture at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, visited as part of a UIC MDes study abroad program. The exhibition's positioning of weaving as a critical practice — shaped by labor, material, culture, and technology — became the departure point for a generative coding project built in p5.js, simulating five established weave structures (plain, twill, basket, satin, chevron) alongside fully randomized over/under patterning and randomized 2- and multi-color relationships.
[View the live sketch]

Selected outputs were translated back into physical weaving — three swatches, each roughly 6 inches tall, woven in embroidery floss on a makeshift loom built from warp thread wrapped around a wooden block. The improvised loom was the point: it re-introduced the friction the code was designed to simulate. Digital precision met material resistance directly, thread by thread, by hand.

The research closes in a publication — an 8x10 inch, 27-spread coil-bound folio collecting archival documentation, process breakdown, and reflection across the full arc of the inquiry.

Clusters

Generative Code
Generative print series, with Amogh Parajuli
2024

BLOCKS: 15, laser-engraved linoleum
SMALL-SCALE: 25 prints, 8x 10", 1 frame, 2-3 ink passes
LARGE-FORMAT: 3 prints, 22 x 30", 9 frames, 3 ink passes
PRESS: etching press
ROLE: generative code (lead), physical production (collaborative)
Built with designer Amogh Parajuli, Clusters translates a generative coding system into physical print. I led the code — a multi-layered p5.js sketch generating abstract symbols and type — which we then translated together into fifteen linoleum blocks, each layer laser-engraved and used interchangeably across compositions. From there, we hand-printed on an etching press, working together through registration, layering, and ink.

The blocks never lock into one arrangement. Twenty-five small-scale prints (8×10", 1 frame, 2–3 ink passes each) explore shifting combinations of the same fifteen blocks, while a final 22×30" large-format grid pushes the system further — nine frames, 3 ink passes, and a registration problem an order of magnitude harder than any single small print. Every composition is unique; the system can generate infinite arrangements, but each print is a single pull that will never be exactly repeated.

Each piece is a static moment pulled from an active system.

The Invisible Man

Title Sequence
Speculative Concept Sequence
2024

RUNTIME: 1:33
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
TECHNIQUE: typography only
VISUALS: ASCII visuals, CRT flicker/degradation
ROLE: concept, type, motion design
A concept title sequence for Leigh Whannell's 2020 film The Invisible Man, built entirely from typographic and type-adjacent elements — no photographic or illustrated imagery, a constraint set deliberately to push type as the sole carrier of mood, motion, and meaning. The sequence runs 1 minute 30 seconds, built in Adobe After Effects.

The film's psychological core — surveillance, isolation, an unseen threat that's always watching — is rendered through the visual language of security monitoring: ASCII characters standing in for image, drawing on the look of old terminal interfaces and hacking aesthetics, and CRT flicker and signal degradation eroding the text as it holds on screen. Layered breathing and computing sounds sit under the score — the breath implying a presence in the room, the computing sound implying the apparatus watching it.

A one-off exercise, made to demonstrate range into motion design and time-based typography.

Studies in Surface & Stitch

Paper Quilt,
Artist Book
UIC Summer Risograph Residency, 2025

PATTERNS: ~30, risograph-printed
QUILT: 5 x 5 ft, machine-sewn paper patchwork
BOOK: 6 x 5", prong-bound, removable pages
EDITION: 32
ROLE: pattern design
Made during a month-long residency — one of two positions in the program's inaugural cohort — this project tests a single set of roughly 30 patterns across two structures built from the same material logic: patchwork construction.

Drawing on wallpaper and textile motifs, I developed the patterns and printed them in large batches on the Risograph, then hand-sewed the paper into two distinct objects. The quilt, 5x5 feet, follows patchwork piecing logic — paper patches sewn edge to edge into a single continuous surface, referencing quilting's basic structural grammar without claiming a specific regional or historical tradition. The artist book, 6x5 inches, reworks the same patterns as a swatch book: individual samples sewn directly onto the page, printed across four stock colors (white, blue, pink, yellow) and stacked in a cascading sequence that reveals a single motif shifting across surface and color.

The book is bound with a prong fastener rather than sewn or glued shut — pages can be removed, reordered, or added. It's built to stay open, the same way the patterns themselves stay in circulation between one object and the next.

frills y furia

Artist Book
OOO Press
2026

EDITIONS: Ox-Bow, ed. 15 (2025); OOO Press, ed. 60 (2026)
FORMAT: 6.5 x 8.5", 18 collages
SOURCE: found/archival print media, lace pattern motifs
BINDING: modified Japanese stab-binding
ROLE: collage, printing, binding
Lace and lucha libre, held in the same frame. One reads as inherently feminine; the other, hyper-masculine, is built on performance, costume, and persona — the mask, the cape, the elaborate embroidery worn into the ring. Frills y Furia collages found and archival lucha libre print material against lace patterns, using lace as both motif and frame, to hold those two coded identities in visual tension across the page. The pairing comes out of my own interest in lucha libre as a cultural reference point within Mexican heritage, more curiosity than lived history — an outsider's close look at a tradition that's culturally close but personally unfamiliar.

Eighteen collages run across roughly 25 spreads, 6.5 x 8.5 inches, printed on the Risograph. The binding is a variation on Japanese stab-binding, reworked to echo the lacing on the back of a lucha mask — interlacing, crossing, pulled tight. Form and content arrive at the same answer.

First produced at Ox-Bow School of Art in an untitled edition of 15. A second edition — expanded in imagery, shifted in ink palette — was produced for A System of Iteration, OOO Press's thesis exhibition, in an edition of 60.

Doble Tejido

Woven Strutures
Double-Woven Paper Structure
2024

PIECES: 2, 16 x 25" each
SOURCE: Lotería cards (Don Clemente deck) — El Corazón, La Rosa
STRUCTURE: double weave, hand-cut strips
CONTENT: fragmented card icon (foreground) / riddle verse, repeated (background) ROLE: concept, weaving, construction
Two large-scale paper weavings, 16 x 25 inches each, built from a single loteria card cut apart and rewoven into two competing layers. The foreground carries the fragmented card icon — El Corazón in one piece, La Rosa in the other. The background is woven from the card's own riddle verse, repeated until the text reads less like language and more like pattern. Strips were cut by hand, laid vertically, and woven horizontally row by row, then glued at key points to hold the structure together — a deliberately improvisational method, closer to hand-assembly than a true loom.

The weaving physically interrupts the printed image: cutting a mass-produced card into strips and reconstructing it by hand turns a familiar, fixed picture into something unstable — legible from a distance, abstracted up close. The riddle behind the image and the image itself compete for the same surface, neither one fully winning.    

South By Southwest

Festival Photography
2022, 2023

2022: Official SXSW Social Media Content Team, 10 days, 200+ images/videos delivered, mobile + mirrorless, same-day turnaround, published to SXSW Instagram
2023: Freelance, editorial-focused
ROLE: photography, content delivery, editorial direction
Two years of photography at South by Southwest, shot from two different vantage points. In 2022, as part of the official SXSW Social Media Content Team, covering the first festival back after the COVID shutdown — ten days, over 200 combined images and video delivered across mobile and mirrorless formats, same-day turnaround, published to SXSW's official Instagram. Coverage ran wide: panels, activations, live performances, behind-the-scenes, and festival atmosphere, shot to match brand needs in real time.

In 2023, returning freelance and outside the brand structure, the work narrowed by choice — toward editorial documentation of panels, atmosphere, and live performance, prioritizing creative control over institutional coverage.

Standalone as a body of work, but the editorial eye developed here carries into photography used across other print and publication projects.

Questions Left Unasked

Artist Book
Poem Anthology
2026

CONTENT: 18 poems, 15 questions (verbatim from journal entries)
PHOTOGRAPHY: original, grayscale, risograph monochrome
FORMAT: 5 x 8", 80 pages, edition of 35
PAPER: light brown text weight
BINDING: die-cut, exposed spine stitch ROLE: writing, photography, editorial direction
Eighteen poems and fifteen questions, pulled verbatim from journal entries, written across the three years spanning my decision to move to Chicago through the end of graduate school. Each spread pairs a question on the left with an original photograph on the right — places, objects, fragments of daily life, shot in color and reprinted in Risograph monochrome. The sequence isn't fixed to a single rhythm; poem, photograph, and question shift order throughout, but the pairing of question and image stays constant across all 80 pages.

The cover is die-cut directly where a reader's hand would naturally grip the book, cutting through to the spine's stitching underneath. Handling the book means handling that opening — the reader is made physically aware of their own grip, asked to hold the object with the same care the questions inside ask for.

Printed on a light brown text-weight stock, bound in an edition of 35.    

Optical Mix

Color Study / Reference
Risograph color study and reference
2026

COMPOSITIONS: 20
COLORS: 13 riso colors
FORMAT: 7 x 11", spiral-bound
EDITION: 50
ROLE: research, color study, design, printmaking
      A publication documenting a series of Risograph experiments in optical color mixing — how ink layers blend, shift, and interfere with each other on the page. The book progresses in two variables at once: color count and control. Early compositions test simple 2-3 color interference patterns under tight, controlled conditions; later pages expand to 4-color combinations and looser, more graphic compositions, letting the same optical principles drive increasingly visual, less systematic work.

Each composition is keyed directly beneath it — single color dots marking the exact riso inks used — so the book functions as a working reference, not just documentation. Built from personal research into how the 13 available Risograph colors mix, layer, and read optically, it's designed to be usable by anyone working through the same color logic.

7x11 inches, spiral-bound, 20 compositions, edition of 50.    

Unregistered Growth

Documentation Publication
OOO Press
2025

DURATION: 5 month, self-directed study
COMPOSITIONS: 7, linoluem relief
TECHNIQUES: reduction, multi-block, low-stakes to complex carving
PRINT: laser (editorial) + risograph (in-the-moment), 2 paper stocks
BINDING: coptic stitch, drop-spine case, edition of 12 ROLE: printmaking, writing, editorial design
The title is a pun on registration — the alignment of layered prints — applied to a five-month, self-taught study in linoleum relief printmaking: growth that was still finding its alignment. Linoleum was the entry point by design, accessible with a low technical barrier, which left more room for experimentation than a steeper learning curve would have allowed. Over the five months, the work moved from low-stakes single-block compositions into reduction printing, multi-block registration, and increasingly complex carving — seven compositions in total, each printed in an edition of 15.

The book documents that arc through two distinct registers, printed on two different paper stocks. Editorial reflection — finished compositions, black text, a step back to assess — is laser-printed on a neutral off-white stock. In-the-moment documentation — process video stills, in-progress written reflections — is Risograph-printed in brown ink on a warm brown stock, closer in feel to a working notebook than a finished record. The two paper systems let a reader feel which mode they're in before they read a word.

Bound in a hand-sewn Coptic stitch and housed in a drop-spine case, in an edition of 12.
© Junior Pacheco - OOO Press 2026