Lost and Found - Boy Wonder meets Queen of Everything
Making a collage is a head-and-heart process that allows a story (or multiple stories) to surface through the strategic grouping of images, creating a new and cohesive whole that is radically different and distant from the origins of any of its unique parts. Allowing the conscious and unconscious to frolic and search, collage celebrates sensibility, sensuality, and intuition. The process of unfolding, that ‘ah ha’ moment of excitement when something teased out of various images surfaces is like the brain copulating with the soul.
Inspired by Hannah Hoch, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and, more recently Cath Tate, Gee Vaucher and Richard Hamilton, I relish in the act of taking an image from its original context and placing it alongside another in a new setting to create an absurdity, a joke or insight. My collage Athena Does Toronto came about by juxtaposing a city landscape against an evocative gender-fluid being with an owl’s feathered face and gold eyes in front of a city skyline that becomes, uncharacteristically, sexy and interesting.
Recently, while thinking about the passing of my poet friend, Don Domanski, I considered his understanding of Buddhism, cycles of life and death, his deep connection to nature and his mastery of poetry, and came up with images that allowed me to pay tribute to his brilliant book, Fetishes of the Floating World.
I rarely know where a collage is going when I glue that first image onto the blank page. My job, as with writing, is to get out of the way of my outcome-driven brain and allow the creative process to do its own thing. Boy Wonder began with a black-and-white image of Audrey Hepburn and ended up moving away from a possible collage about glamour and beauty to become a piece that spoke to longing, loss, childhood naiveté, and the pleasures of high ‘camp’.
The irreversible fear and grief experienced by a community, and the irreparable damage to my own psyche after a serial killer takes eight beautiful lives from the gay village are expressed in Lostness. Through the writing of Blue Suitcase: Documentary Poetics I needed a way of releasing the intense emotions of the poems—Lostness was one of the first collages that I did as I wrote the book, now published by Mansfield Press.
Placing a naked goddess on a crimson bed next to an old photograph of myself in Self-portrait With Lucie or, celebrating Rue Paul’s over-the-top sass and glitter by tucking a tiny portrait of Meghan Markle under her armpit in Queen of Everything was just plain fun!
Art has always been an important part of my life. For years I have written poems inspired by art. My collection Music Garden has several exphrastic poems written in response to Salvador Dali’s work. In my poem, “Chardin’s Rabbit,” after Jean Simeon Chardin, the narrator leaps from describing an eighteenth century painting to expressing the complex emotions of having an affair with a married man. Who knew a dead rabbit could evoke so much beauty, lust, anger?!
In thinking about Lost and Found, I am also reminded of my poem, JOHN ASHBERY. The poem is a tribute to Ashbery and the affinity I feel with his work. It builds around one of his poems printed next to a photograph of a Martha Graham in the New Yorker. I had worshiped Graham for many years. Her quote, There is a vitality ,a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action.., is written on the front page of my journal.
Ashbery was drawn to Surrealists like Roussel, Dali, and Dada. His Pulitzer Prize winning book, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was inspired by a painting by Francesco Mazzola. Reading an Ashbery poem is akin to allowing your eye to wander over an abstract painting. The words and sentences of his poems seem random. Then, somewhere near the end of the poem something shifts and a seemingly disconnected sequence of words unite and make sense—not necessarily in a linear way, rather, the poem pulls itself together on a gut level. I trust Ashbery’s poetic brilliance in the same way I endeavor to trust my own poetry and collage making—the logical side of my brain has a tantrum while my more playful side frolics and thrives.
In her song, Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell writes: somethings lost, but somethings gained in living every day—my collages are an attempt to expand on this sentiment. Through collage I am able to acknowledge the passage of time while staying present to the expansive nature of any given moment—somethings lost but somehow reclaimed—in a new light, with energy, sensuality, and grace of its own.