miart Digital Edition 2020
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The way I do collage and the way I use the medium has first and foremost to do with the way I understand the world. I see reality as a collection of subjectivities, a multitude of worlds that bleed into each other to inform our shared reality. Collage as a composition strategy has a lot to do with that.
Here, collage is used to create works that bear witness to a world entangled. I use what is usually at hand’s reach and sometimes that can create a picture not of harmony but of what reality can be. The plethora of perceptions around us create different places and spaces which exist at the margins of our shared reality.
This ambiguity in the midst of the everyday banality and the variety of interpretations it creates is at the center of the drive that is behind this kind of work. What feeds into my production of these works are the leftovers of the every-day and the close-by and the seeking of a certain balance between order and disorder.
What I choose usually comes through a stream of consciousness but always bares evidence to a certain right-here-and-right-now that stems from the artist’s studio but actually has to do with life at large. It has to do with “the porous body between studio and the real world”. The studio mess informs this practice by way of high possibility; everything around you can have the potential to play a role in the process. Everything exists at once.
At the same time, I am trying to create physical rubble of pictorial surplus; to visualize a mental situation of what happens when one is overtaken by stimuli and acceleration. The outcome can be deeply personal and emotional, diaristic and fragmented. When one understands themselves as fragments, they view the world through a fragmented point of view.
– Anastasia Pavlou