OFFCUTS

ARTIST statement

When preparing for this show one of the tasks was to create an artist statement.  I read a few to figure out 'what' to do, but in the end chose not to follow those guidelines.  Rather then a cold, 3rd person writing of superlatives and adjectives, I'll simply write this as me, and in a way, to me. 

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My practice is a time consuming one where much of the joy is in the methodical and meditative way a piece is produced.  Increasingly in our world we find everything revolving around speed and efficiency. Countless studies show the average attention span is rapidly shrinking, and its effect in what we consume and how is becoming ever more apparant.  I often wonder if the 'epic' has a place in our near future or if the highlight reaction reel supercut of an epic will be more generally preferred.

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Despite this, or rather, in spite of this, I have continued to double down on my belief that we can choose what we give meaning to. I give just as much meaning to the process as I do the outcome when making my art. 

When titling this show, Luca Ponsato recommended the word Offcuts "the leftover scraps and materials that remain after something is created".  And it seems fitting.  While these pieces find themselves born from scraps of old comics, tagboard, and gustave dore prints, they are also just as much a creation from a leftover practice of worrying less about feeding an ever hungry algorithm with content and more about working with intention and the understanding that I don't want to rush to the end. Rather we should savor what we do and relish in the very act of doing it. 

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CURATORIAL STATEMENT

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Every fragment has a past.

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Offcuts is a body of work built from the margins: the trimmings, the edges, the discarded pages that once lived other lives. In my practice as a physical collage artist, I create art almost exclusively with these tiny  pieces of paper, which I hand-cut from books, magazines, and colored paper. Each piece holds its own memory of another time: a faded hue or a forgotten texture.

Arranged together, these fragments of paper become narrative scenes. They are layered glimpses into imagined histories with deep emotional undercurrents. Some works may suggest a place or a memory, while others may hover on the edge of abstraction. All of them are acts of storytelling through salvage.

Offcuts is not only a description of material leftover from hand-cutting my collage material, but also is a way of seeing the world: what we overlook, what we throw away, and what we might piece together again. Life is about reassembly and finding resonance in the remnants.