I'm Stephanie.

Friday, February 3, 2012

post iii - Pastiche Personne

A lot of the time in my life, I feel like a walking collage. I quote movie lines back and forth between friends (or Brule's Rules lines..."you've already got a penn-iss! Don't chop it off!"), I see things in relation to other things, some days I dress like I'm from the 40s, and then I go out and buy Adidas sneakers that remind me of KeSha. I still sometimes want to be Britney Spears circa 1997, and then other times I want to be like, this feminist who doesn't give a shit, who reads Gertrude Stein and Margaret Atwood, and who can cut off all my hair, not panic if I don't stay teeny tiny, and not wear a bra ever (my mom has definitely taken issue with me when I don't).







While I was raised on Catholicism, I was ironically, also raised on The Simpsons. The Simpsons, as we all know, is entirely dependent on pop culture references for majority of its humor. So little of what happens on the Simpsons is not in reference to something else. The Simpsons serves as this pastiche of Western culture, and our relevant figures of the moment tend to end up amongst its characters, now with eight fingers. Even the Strokes made it to the Simpsons (much to my delight).



It is these factors that I believe, has led me to a kind of obsession with collaging. With creating juxtapositions of images that become something completely different when shaped into the collage. Since I was maybe 14, I've been cutting, pasting, and arranging as many images and strange objects into art as I can, without really knowing where this impulse originates. I think I know now. There is no other way to arrange the fuck-all of thoughts, references, and signifiers in my fucking head.



Simona sent me a post card with this image, and the confusion somehow demonstrated in this work of art screamed to me to examine the ways in which I too collage in trying to make sense of the senseless. By Raoul Hausmann:



In California, the freeways serve as collages. Lap Band, Six Dollar Burger, Rolex, Spearmint Rhino, Disneyland, "Real Fruit" Smoothies at McDonalds. Racing past the signs at 75 miles per hour (at least) while maybe listening to some indie band with poetic lyrics, feeling like you're driving into the smog but then realizing that you've been inside of it the whole time.



The collage I have found to be a release. A channeling. An understanding of the "fuck-all" referenced above, and instead of mourning it, making it into art:

(canvas collages)



(room at my parents' house)





(envelope to Simona)



(my beautiful mom who urges me to not go bra-less)



(picture frames I made for Alica with beads, pins, plastic pigs, etc)



The collage serves as my kind of submission, my yielding, that I can't make true sense of a lot of what I'm fed by this world so at least maybe I can steal elements from it and turn those elements into something pretty. After all, aesthetics are more important than sense in this day and age, right?

So where am I in the collage of my being? How much is me, and how much are bits and pieces that I have pasted onto and into myself? Fuck if I know.



The collage is my control. The collage is my physical channeling, arranging, and controlling the signs and images that can sometimes pummel a thinking, feeling girl straight into the ground. The collage is my scream.

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