Collage Statement
Cut, arrange, analyze, change, glue, mount, varnish. I make my work with images mined from art history books, auction catalogs, art magazines, and posters.
If collage is an assemblage of different forms and ideas, recontextualized to create a new whole, then all art is collage. Whether artists are aware of it or not, they build upon the work of others who came before and I find it extremely comforting to know that I’m standing on the backs of canonical artists within an art historical tradition.
The conceptual artist Sherry Levine has said, “The world is filled to suffocating. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged.” It begs the question of originality: why bother making new images when there’s so much existing material ripe for the picking? Unlike Levine, I don’t consider what I do "appropriation" because rather than reworking an entire artwork, I take small, seemingly insignificant sections that draw me to their shapes, colors and textures. I gather them into compositions that play with their complimentary and contrasting attributes and I make them into works that are bright, lyrical, and visually confounding. The larger scale pieces are glued to laser-cut 3/4” maple plywood and hang far off the wall, physically confronting the viewer to provoke a somatic response.