So the other day I was looking at the dolls I use in many of my assemblages, and thought I should photograph them and use the images as design elements in collage. These 6-7" porcelain dolls just speak to me. The seem to carry some essence of 'beingness' that says something, but I really don't know what. And I don't mind a bit that I don't really know.
Pieces involving the Girls pop up pretty regularly. After stamping the dolls in the first piece with letters, I continued that theme - trading off with numbers or letters - thus they became the Alpha & Numeral girls. The dolls in the collage sport punctuation marks instead of letters & numbers. There's always a rebel in the bunch.
Retro images just speak to me. I love old advertising and vintage commercial design. Fashion backward. So maybe it's childhood or classic movies. Maybe is brainwashing by the ad industry. Whatever it is - retro images capture something that I want to express.
Retro
We Are A We
Vintage dolls represent the many - and sometimes conflicting - aspects that make up the collective we each are.
Art Dream is a collage that emerged from just what is says - a dream about art.
The evening of the dream I had watched two television programs about artists on Halogen tv - a quirky little network on cable and online http://halogentv.com. They have programs with a contemporary flare and a line of shows about art and artists - Aperture, Art In Progress, Desination Art and more.
This particular night featured Tim Nobel and Sue Webster, 2 uber-contemporary artists. http://www.timnobleandsuewebster.com/ I was especially struck by Nobel & Webster's Dirty White Trash, an assemblage of trash arranged precisely to cast a shadow of the couple themselves.
Dirty White Trash _ Tim Nobel & Sue Webster
The other program featured Laurie Simonshttp://www.lauriesimmons.net. Laurie uses ventriloquist dummies, puppets, paper cut-outs, miniatures and more to create amazing photographs and films.
The Music of Regret stars Meryl Streep [!] with Laurie's creations and songs.
The dream began with a video scene of me saying that I was going to use everything in my studio to make an on-going assemblage. The first thing I did was create a tower of shoes - using some completed shoe art and all the shoes I had on hand for future pieces. I then spent a lot of time searching in second-hand stores for a large cabinet. Back in the studio I then began adding to it and gluing on it everything at hand. The dream then moved on to some old fantasy projects I've enjoyed musing about for years - making an ongoing assemblage out of a wooden storage building, a vintage gas station and a retro diner.
The collage itself includes mini-collages of each of the design elements. Details within the collages include some of my favorite retro images - a Nash Metropolitan, vintage toys, mannequins, a Kit Kat clock, as always, dolls & doll parts and so on.
I like to think of this collage as a sketch-book - holding the promise of future work.
Found images. Googled images.Created & altered images. Juxtapositions & incongruencies.
If anything I've shared here speaks to you, do let me know. I'd love to hear from you.
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