collage poetry + unmeaning
I'm a cynic, yet slightly half full. I believe I mean well, but it doesn't always come across as such.
My wife and I mock-read trite inspirational phrases meant to uplift and make the home, homey.
The "Eat, Pray, Love" slogans. I know you've seen them.
The curvy, faux calligraphy with its thin ascenders and thick descender strokes. The reminders that you're in 'margaritaville' and that 'it's always happy hour around here'.
I set out to create a short series of collages with superimposed messages that are cryptic, yet simplistic.
The imagery, banal. It lacks the drama usually meant to scandalize. No overt sexuality or direct controversy for immediate crass, well...mostly.
The words, mostly made up and phrases unrestricted by modern grammar.
Spend enough time looking up words you don't understand on Google to find out they're being made up. However, what wasn't?
How can I give the text flux license to move and behave graphically as well as conceptually? It's allowed to have meaningful streams of thought and be a pure aesthetic value all the same.
How can the combination of text be familiar and uncanny as it is juxtaposed with a woven fabric of multiple thoughts at once? Our train-of-thought is anything but linear.
The layouts became color fields of the subconscious where the repetition of elements are never the same.
I could've used more cutout elements from my found sources, but a certain fun anxiety of recycled thoughts began to cannibalize itself and create slightly newer concepts.
It doesn't matter how you read them, because they exist out of time as you believe to understand it.
They just are.
