My primary practice is collage and mixed media. I also work in video and performance art as well. I’m drawn to collage because of the recognition that there’s no hierarchy in quantum physics. In analyzing and creating art, Ian White’s assertion that subtraction as addition is a solution to perception and assessment.
It’s hard to be devoid of assumptions since we exist along the axes of signifiance and subjectification according to Deleuze and Guattari (D&G). Our evolutionary imprint to identify the face, search for the face, find the face, even when there’s no face, mar our attempt to be void of expectations. According to D&G, we need to deterritorialize the face, separate cultural codes from the material.
Collage is deterritorialization. Deterritorializing the source and recontextualizing with a new destination stretches taunt the tension between displacement and simulation. The glossy surface of magazine advertisements, the source material, parallels the shallow enticement of the archetypal. Try to find a pattern of logic and impartiality amidst lexicons of commodity is to search in vain. Collaging allows the source material to leave its trace DNA on its destination, or the new “source." And the taint from its past adds dimensions to the new image created.
Instead of retaining the representational meaning of objects from magazines, I isolate the source down to formal components, in terms of color, tone, texture, and value. To deconstruct images for the masses and reconstruct into unique images injects meaning into the materiality of ephemera.