Collage: Machine-Made Images As Interrogation Tactics
I close out the year working on handmade objects entirely made from pre-made images collected from popular culture
Collages are three things in my practice:
Assemblages of pre-configured ideas and commentary that are manipulated into being an interrogation of culture
An attempt at finding spiritual energy in manufactured commodities
A question: “Is it true that artists cannot make abstract art that articulates consciousness or meaning?”
I started making collages because I became super-aware of how the clean image, or the digital image, in particular, seems forced. It seems like something that is designed for an eye that is trained to pay attention to every new distraction. This idea unsettled me, because it means that images are almost platonically not effective in conveying meaning. They are simply fleeting spectacles that entrance us, captivate attention, and then convey zero real information. They (and the artists who make them) are like the conversationalists who say something only to spark something in the other interlocutor that they already know and want confirmed.
My first collages (“In a Sea of Ancient Foretold Prophecies”, above) played with this idea by interrogating physical imagery. I focused primarily on layering paper products one after the other on top of each other, mixing media, writing in ancient scripts, gluing things like fabric and pictures into the base layers and further concealing them with more glue and more paper. I did this because to me the act itself was the commentary. To say something = to see it covered up. To see something = doing the work of mentally or physically uncovering it.
Over time, I began to see that this act itself was a metaphor. The act of layering was a metaphor for how meaningful ideas, when they come together through artist action, are like the comments and likes and quips we share on social media and in conversation that are immediately lost or covered up by “noise” and the inconsequential. They then in turn become noise themselves and inconsequential. The harder work seems to be interpreting them, rather than making the images.
Everything ends up being an act of digital and cerebral archaeology. This provoked further imagery:
Maybe this is trite or already done before. Concealing = making.
I also tried doing this by assembling things physically through layers and then turning them into a digital collage. It has a different effect. A digital collage doesn’t interrogate the medium. It doesn’t force the audience or the artist to face the boundaries of the medium. At the risk of seeming inconsequential, the digital image appears as “information”. The assemblage of images may tell a story, but that story is already lost, in my opinion, as soon as it exists in its digital form.
“Hidden Hunter” is aesthetically pleasing, but even though I made the image, I don’t think it does any work. I think an image could do more. This collage is a mashup of several different print objects, taken out of focus, merged and remerged and mixed to produce a grid-like aura.
Compare this to a digital image I made completely by hand using a stylus:
Maybe a little off-center, but the focus here is on how “human” movement blends colour and non-machine aesthetics to form something more than an image or a picture. It is a series of gestures. It has the sense of the Romantic to it. It is digital, and this way is a commentary on how it is a representation, but the gesture, the effort, the muscle memory that produces a new object creates a lot more intrigue and mystery than a machine-blended collage.
So that’s how I end 2024. I created a lot of work this year. I have not taken much time to write about it. I want to spend 2025 regularly writing about the work I am creating.
I have a feeling that collage is going to take me back to physical paints and handheld tools. As a practice, this is good training. I can study framing. I can study how images are used as static representations. I can see their limits. I can feel their sanitised entry into the image canon. I can see how it the whole canon of imagery is a sanitised horde rather than collective abstraction of our consciousness.
All of the most interesting things to me are handmade by myself. When paper and ink meet, and when hand guides their making, something original and real comes out of the reality we share and forms a new focus.
Happy new year. More to come in 2025.