Please enjoy this flipbook preview of my new collage works in the order they were created. I recommend a full-screen view on a laptop, desktop, or tablet. 8x10 prints available for $25! I have some in stock, and I take special orders. Get in touch!
ARTIST STATEMENT for DECONTEXTUALIZED
I make dreamlike abstract collages out of print media, paper ephemera, and scraps/garbage from mid-century to today. They're like layered visual koans -- evocative yet unanswerable questions. I'm chasing a special satisfaction that occurs when wildly disparate, seemingly unrelated images click into place under my fingertips, in instances of strange compositional serendipity. My designs are concerned with the pleasures of texture, density, balance, dynamics, movement, tension, rhythm, and color.
While the majority of my collages are not “about” anything, I think that repeatedly cycling through the physical acts of both destruction and rebuilding – which is what collage practice requires -– feels like an excellent outlet for and expression of healthy anger, fractured narratives, and the vibrant drive toward wholeness that characterize my experience of recovery from Complex Trauma.
The unusual transparent and grungy layered effects featured in this work are accomplished with a packing tape lift/transfer technique. Learning that, and loving it so much, is what catalyzed the drive to keep making them. Collecting, harvesting, preparing, and organizing my source materials (free or cheap magazines, books, booklets, newspapers, scraps from my own desk, etc) happens in stages, usually long before I sit down for a work session.
This project has been a great way to exercise instincts for design that have been developing for decades, not only from my art-making experience but also — I suspect — through years of physically embodying clear, concise, dynamic “compositions” through ensemble-based arts: performing modern dance choreography, writing and playing drum parts in bands, and singing polyphonic songs in the Sacred Harp group tradition.
Collage was something I used to occasionally dabble in, influenced by areas of DIY/punk/zine counterculture and therapeutic Expressive Arts. But this unprecedented cohesive series that became DECONTEXTUALIZED was born of a few specific influences
1) The collective upheaval and paradigm shifts from Covid 2) A pair of unrelated artists I started following on instagram and whose collages I loved, but I didn’t understand how they were made — which led me to learning the packing tape method, and 3) Being entirely decontextualized, myself! After a sequence of losses before and during Covid, I moved out of the area I’d live in for 25 years, with a fraction of my possessions, into a somewhat risky situation in an unfamiliar city where I knew only one person.