PICTURE CATALOGUE

Penticton Art Gallery 
January 22 – March 13, 2016

Eastern Edge Gallery 
June 18 – July 6, 2016

Picture Catalogue is an ongoing collage series in which images that once spread across two pages of a magazine are removed from their original context and recombined—mismatched—in collages that join at the gutter of my sketchbook. These centralized compositions bleed into one another and break up the surrounding negative space. For a year I have been collecting images from old and new magazines as well as pillaging the Toronto Reference Library’s picture collection, an archive that houses over a million images clipped from magazines, discontinued books, and printed photographs.

After an initial period of collecting and documenting, I began experimenting with the material in order to find the right fit for each composition, through the process of selecting, cutting, and joining images. Carefully choosing graphic elements for their abstract properties instead of their overt cultural references, I attempt to skirt the nostalgia inherent in the source imagery. By way of intuition and chance encounters in the collage process I explore the tension generated by combining fragments of individual narratives—giving found materials an intended design and sense of purpose.Preserving the format of my sketchbook I have reproduced them as prints on a folded sheet of paper and by doing so reference the materials origins at the seam of a publication adapting and manipulating the point where two images intersect.

Using Format