Artist’s Statement
Collage is a dynamic form in which I find balance in my life as an artist—both as a constant practice and as a visual representation. Collages are hysterical surprises, fragmented landscapes, delirious layers of appropriation and ambiguity, shocks of juxtaposition, subconscious reactions, and automatic narratives in the surrealist spirit. Collage is a means to collide times, to simultaneously forget and remember, to process and refuse, resist and celebrate, to whimsically collect and discard scarps of everything, to combine the unconscious space of dreams and fantasy with the foreigner’s zone and a stranger’s perspective, to spin a magical narrative out of printed materials that have been circulated in various circles of use, organic elements, tape, childhood drawings, playing cards, discarded books, postcards, art historical reproductions, magazines, xerox transfers, anatomical illustrations, vintage and new photographs, archives, maps, an old bible, and book covers. In the spirit of German artist Hannah Höch, who made collages at the dawn of the era of mechanical reproduction, I am working against the virtual tide of exclusive and temporary digital experience. I utilize and undo tangible representations of the past and present to offer images of a dystopian (disruptive)/utopian (fragile) imaginary. Still engaged with ethical seeing, the collages subvert dominant ideologies and mainstream representations of desire, struggle, and being. Collages are critiques of representation itself. Recent collages have addressed child detentions along the Mexico border, transgender rights, feminist liberation, climate change, and terrorism—all through the use, juxtaposition, and transformation of images of the human body. A terrorist becomes a nursing mother. Trees suddenly have eyes and mouths. An image of important modernist artists—all men—is turned into a meeting of diverse women. I am making my own summary of the world, trying to find a balance amidst the total imbalance.
One Person’s Pleasure Is Another’s Crash is a hyper-dynamic composition on a found silver gelatin print of a playground amidst palm trees. Performance artists, circus acrobats, gymnasts, a cyclist balancing, people exercising and relaxing—all meet on the horizon, where cement meets sky. There is potential and real energy here, humans upside down and soaring, suspended and reaching.
Claude Cahun Watches over Us is a collage on a found silver gelatin print of a magical misty landscape of the sea and breathtaking rocks. Through collage, the rocks are now given sight, able to see us, while Claude Cahun (a French artist-photographer who was an active member of the French resistance against the Nazis) balances on one of those rocks, her cape open and full of masks. This is a surreal ecosystem.