My text-based digital photo-collages draw from traditions of urban landscape photography, collage, erasure poetry, altered books, and graffiti/street art. I digitally alter and collage onto my own photographs of murals and graffiti. I add such things as old book pages, ads, maps, and I usually contribute small bits of my own text— mini-poems, if you will.
I try to create intersections of “poetic” text with decidedly non-poetic materials, thus blurring boundaries between literature and visual art, between highbrow poetry and urban street art, between fiction and poetry, between commercial and literary endeavors, and print/reading and gallery/viewing.
I’m an urban walker, and I love to take photographs as I walk. I like the conversations between graffers and passersby on the walls. It’s an ancient practice. Graffiti has been found on the walls of Pompeii. I like to participate in the conversation, especially speaking back to prevailing ideologies of—for example, here—”heaven” and “magical thinking.”
Spending time with bright, colorful images also gives me some relief from what feels like a dark time of dread and doom swirling around me—no doubt from the current world trends towards authoritarianism. Also, sensing images may often be a primary way doors open to what Gertrude Stein called “empathic receptivity,” I want to reinvigorate the act of reading, allowing the text to be bolstered by, but not overpowered by, images. Images! I love to dance between them, to belong to them, to torque, freeze, nibble, and blast ’em to smithereens.
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“Live Woman in Halves”
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“Denied Your Heaven”
