Audio Transcription
The Collages on Color Kaleidoscopes, or C.O.C.K.S., combine feminine images cut from magazines and advertisements and pairs them with cutouts of artworks and floral motifs along with found objects and sewing notions. These nostalgia-femme works, saturated in color are descendants of magazine layouts and scrapbooking motifs.
These pieces riff on the ‘commonplace books’ of the 15th century, which compiled items like recipes, quotations, letters and poems. The ‘friendship albums’ of the 16th century, to the yearbooks and friendship books created by 18th and 19th century school girls. These replaced journaling as a way to document their experiences in a way that was aesthetically pleasing, using the ephemera and memorabilia from their daily lives, such as visiting cards, ticket stubs, plants and even trinkets. More personally, these are manifestations of growing up with a Mother that was a graphic designer, realizing those basic building blocks of design were imbedded in my psyche while sitting in on her ‘Graphic Design for Non-Art Majors’ in my pre-teen years, when I should have been concentrating on my math homework.
The collages in this series are focused on elements of nostalgia and word play or innuendo. Taking vintage cookbook recipes or advertisements glorifying the sexist landscape of the mid-20th century and turning its head on the feminine nostalgia of the cult of domesticity. Most of the items used to collage have been passed along to me from my Mother, Grandmother, and Great Grandmother. These objects of my lineage call to an era that seems so familiar and so foreign at the same time. Embroidery thread that I vaguely remember being taught how to make a blanket-stitch, now used to puncture the paper, creating a slash across the imagery. Round stickers, like the ones my Grandma used during her summer garage sales, alongside snippets of vintage recipes, the titles and descriptions shouting double entendre, “Pineapple Delight”, “Chocolate Coconut Twosome”, or in this case, a reader’s submission from the 1958 Happy Home Cookbook, “How to bake a batch of children.” This piece has a Lichtenstein eye, cut from an auction catalog, a floral from a Linder photograph featured in a contemporary magazine, a vintage camera advertisement, and a Playboy model from the year 1969.