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I call my collages "paper gumbo"
because I construct them from various
kinds of paper — candy wrappers,
handmade sheets created by friends, magazine
fragments, pages of old books, scraps
of frozen food packages, plastic products,
and the occasional dried flower. In my
aesthetic, nothing is trash. All of it
can be used, and manipulated into something
that can potentially become beautiful.
As a teenager, I was visually seduced
by the work of the contemporary artists
Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and
Romare Bearden. Pop culture junkie that
I am, and member of the first generation
of MTV youth, I was always transfixed
by the ways in which these artists feasted
from American culture to create work which
assimilated, stimulated, and interrogated
its spectators.
My experimentations with collage are based
on my attempts to create balance and symmetry
from very random, sometimes disparate
images, colors, paper sources and found
fragments. It is also an honoring process
in which I seek to affirm the lives of
the ancestors.
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