Artist Statement

Like dreams, my art is fleeting and a bit surreal. My collages are handmade with clean, precise cuts and careful placement, but then taken apart as quickly as they were constructed.

Although I dabble in more traditional subjects and mediums such as charcoal, ink, and printmaking; I have a playful impulse to alter what already exists and reimagine the world as I see fit. Though collage is certainly not a new or unique process, it has allowed many artists like me to further the imagination. I take images from their original context and reimagine them as characters and props to be mixed-and-matched in a new scene. In my world, a parakeet can model for a portrait wearing a kimono and a child can be a giant dwelling underground in a suburban neighborhood.

Collage at its core and most broad definition encompasses more than realized. I would apply collage to society itself, most notably America’s so-called “melting pot” with its intermingling of identities, beliefs and value systems from widely varied backgrounds. We are collages onto ourselves, an assemblage of cultural influences, choices, and lives we lead. Collages, especially photomontages like mine, are facilitated by what some may call our culture of ‘ready-made’ and commodity.

Though my collages are a reflection of the media’s consumeristic and increasingly interconnected culture, I like to explore themes of love, attraction, family, and individual strength and emotion through various motifs. Because collage naturally lends itself to surrealism, the images I create have a crisp, dreamlike quality to them; leaving just enough room for the viewer to form their own interpretation.