Studio Exploration
It’s how one minute you’re driving at sunrise, and the sky is a pale, misty purple. The mountains to your left are sleepy. It’s how the next minute, you look back, and those same sleepy mountains have been awoken in a cadmium red glow. Then, as if on cue, orange and red begin to crawl across the sky above you. It’s that moment you are suspended in reality, because who would’ve known a mundane moment could be so sublime.
It’s those moments that I search for, and that I search to find the language to communicate. I want to relive that same wonder so badly that I can’t help but try and replicate it symbolically. This body of work reflects an intimate nostalgia for this sublime experience. Through the medium of collage, I am able to combine illustration, photography, and found images to create a sequential and thematic narrative. Rather than just taking a photo of the sunset and enjoying that singular, captured moment, I aim to convey the unfolding of the sunset, a sequence of memories and synthesis of senses. I want to capture the feeling of driving, the feeling of seeing the colors gradually fill the sky, the feeling of the music that's playing softly in the background, and the whispers from your friends as you all experience it together.
Each collage draws on these memories of the sublime moments experienced while driving across the United States. Color, shape, and composition function as the mise en scene while imagery and words elicit the narrative. For one, each collage has a very specific color palette that operates both as a tool for distinguishing the separate memories, but also to emphasize a certain feeling or mood. By using a restricted color palette in each work, I am able to utilize composition and shape to drive the visual rhythm that references this sequence of moments. While one composition based on the memory of water is composed around a spiral, another one translates the act of physically driving through a grid-like construction. How your eye travels through the work is how I wish to relive these unfolding moments. At the same time, the sublime is heavily referenced in the juxtaposition of scale and perspective; how the grandeur of mountains and open spaces makes you feel so small in comparison.
Overall, the feeling of a memory is rendered through a fragmentation of form and combination of symbolic imagery. The process of recalling a certain memory involves piecing together different moments, and so these collages are literally me using pieces of imagery to generate that feeling. A certain color may stand out more than an image, while in another, it is the words that render my experience more clearly over the actual picture of a mountain. Really, the entire collage is a visual manifestation of my mental processes in attempting to recall and communicate these experiences that inspire my work as an artist. Sometimes, it comes out in a storm of formal nuances, but I think that makes just more personally authentic.