My collage work is rooted in the collection and recontextualization of vintage materials and imagery from the 1950s through the 1980s, which I regard as traces of personal and collective memory. I use yearbooks, “how-to” manuals, catalogs and other era-specific suburban artifacts to conjure a nostalgia that is both sentimental and disquieting. I preserve the time-worn marks that the materials carry such as tape, staples, page numbers and dogears, so that finished pieces are intentionally preserved, with slight reconfigurations. The work echoes the contemporary pervasive digital landscape of on-screen image consumption, and reveals how memory, poetry and humor intertwine within the uncanny familiarity of the mundane.
The text offers a layer both literal and metaphorical. Phrases, usually song lyrics that have particular relevance and poignancy, are written in a font inspired and created from graffiti handstyling, and hand-cut in latticed shapes. The words are left intentionally ambiguous as a way to engage the viewer’s body and time through closer inspection, as they examine the retrieval mechanisms used to access our experiences. The lyric cut outs present a visual analogue to the music-evoked memory phenomenon and explore how both words and images interact and intersect over time.