By the time I began making this artwork in May 2023, I had not made a paper collage in approximately a year. For an artist whose visual practice first took form with newspaper clippings, and who fundamentally understands the creation of art from the collagist’s mindset, this hiatus might seem out of sorts. Yet I’ve turned my attention away from the medium periodically since 2017, when I began making the abstract series Fires in the Shade with ink.
My complaint, in essence, is that a paper collage cannot help but retain the referents of the materials that compose it. Unlike paint, which on the whole our culture accepts as having no meaning beyond its color, scraps are discernable documents of the sources from, and of the eras in, which they originate. That they are indivisible from their historical contexts colors their meanings in turn.
Of course, this quality allows of the unexpected, critical, and spontaneous juxtaposition of meanings that imbue the medium with its unique expressive power; allows of the recontextualization of information. Even so, I’ve grown wary the materials themselves — bearing various meanings from various moments in the past — may ultimately motivate the content of the artwork, such that a paper collage becomes willy-nilly about the contexts it contains. And on occasion I desire to devise my own meaning, to use color in place of documents.
Now, when I’m inspired to work in the medium is when I can imagine harnessing the referents of materials in the service of a meaning I’ve formulated independent of them. By this tack, the content of the artwork may motivate the choice of materials along the with the meanings they should bear, as a painter is able to envision that which he will depict.
I applied this tack when making “Live Laugh Love,” for I sought, and perhaps needed, to illustrate a certain forlornness that attends many domestic spaces in America, and that looms over the lives of many Americans, in the present moment. What better way to represent such a space than with the furnishings one may find therein?
A plant, a pot, a chair, a kind of poster on the wall, and a window. The most spartan of rooms. But linger on the details. The materials that compose the artwork are documents of the setting they signify. To wit, an image of a plant from a mailed invitation, an image of a pot and a chair from the respective boxes in which the actual pot and chair were delivered, and letters printed on the pages of magazines. The window admittedly is not so literal. I collaged the azure seen through it with photographs of sky and blue color fields printed on the pages of magazines alike. Rather than show (let alone index) the outside, here I primarily wished to reinforce a tactile sense of interiority.
Though even granting this abstraction, I chose each of these materials in part because they communicate a contemporaneous experience. They are not incidental, neither culled from sources of yesteryear nor unrelated to the subject at hand. Instead they are topical: having recently amassed the materials through the course of daily life, I had them lying around my apartment.
From a conceptual standpoint then, I believe I succeeded in making an intentional artwork in the medium of paper collage; in using the meanings of scraps in the service of my own meaning. Then again, what that meaning is, and how convincing it is to you, is something of an open question.
July 4, 2023