Collage Work
My interest in visual art has not been limited to digital mediums, as since my freshman year of college I have found working with my hands to be a lot more satisfying. Collage work specifically has been one of my central-most passions.
2021
While in lockdown and living at my childhood home with my parents in Queens NYC I dedicated myself to three things in an attempt to retain my sanity. The first was school, as I desperately did not want to fall behind. The second was music, and this became a time where I would learn a lot and push myself to make music every single day. The last one was my X-ray collage. Using X-rays that had been taken of my mom combined with X-ray’s of animals sold for educational purposes, I spent hours meticulously cutting the plastic up and taping it as seamlessly I could to my windows. X-rays allowed me to experiment with things like layering, light, and perspective. For example, the fact that the art piece could be viewed from both the front (from my room) and the back (from my balcony) added a whole new dimension to it that I had never really had to consider before. A few years later, with me and my brother in college, my parents sold the apartment I had grown up in for nearly my entire life, and I was able to take my favorite panels off the window in full, wrap them up in some extra tape, and put them in safe keeping.
2022
In 2022 I made my return to the college dorms and I was able to resume the method of collage work I had embarked upon during my freshman year, before I was unceremoniously kicked out due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Although it started initially as a means to just liven up my room and cover the blank walls with something, it quickly became what was essentially my biggest and most time consuming extra-curricular. Every week or so I would go to the famous Strand bookstore with my headphones in, make my way up to the second floor, and slither into the corner of the building that had discount art books. I would spend time going through each and every single book, looking for inspiration for what was to go on my wall next. Sometimes I would find a cool architectural book with graphs and photos that I would cut up and join together to create these kind of imaginary spaces. Sometimes I would find something less abstract, like pictures of televisions or marine life that I could cut up and cobble into creatures, or group together in sections that felt thematically appropriate. More often than not I would just be looking for textures and colors that seemed pleasing, which I could then cut into whatever shapes I needed.
A big part of this project to me was the lack of permanence. No matter what happened, when the year ended I would have to move out of the dorm and take down my art. Although I ended up saving a healthy amount of my favorite bits, to save an entire rooms worth of mural-collage would simply not be possible. This pushed the entire project to become an exercise in letting go and not becoming overly attached to ones art.
2023
2023 was my last year in the college dorms, and I decided that I wanted to try something new. Although I was set on collage work as being my medium, I was feeling weird about utilizing the strand art books to make my artwork. Not because of the limiting nature of them, as this could often push me to be more creative, but because I started to doubt the ethics of it. Was it stealing to use someone else’s work, chopping it up and replacing it in a nearly unrecognizable form, and then calling it your own? I decided that I would collage, but using my own drawings strictly. A large part of my process became to fill up pages and pages in my sketchbook, rip the pages out, then rip the pages into the pieces I wanted to place on the wall. While this created some of my favorite art yet, if you zoom in you can see how dedicated I was to drawing an insane amount of little droplets. Once I had committed to them and the limited amount of time I had sunk in, it was a bit of a recipe from disaster, and by the end of the project I had clearly overworked my right hand and decided it would need to rest for a long time before I embarked on something like this again.
When it was time to move out, I was once again fully prepared to take the art down. This time, I took a time lapse of the deconstruction process as I really wanted to lean into the idea that the temporary nature of the mural was an essential part of its existence, and that it had been made with the fact that it would have to be taken down at the end of the year in mind the whole time.
