Words

Daniel Biddy
Intent
2015

Born out of a preoccupation with “looking”, a subdued mania for collections, and an integral compulsion to arrange groups of things, I work in collage. The variance and multiplicity within its unassembled elements, the immediacy of its potential to create associative content, the element of chance and discovery in the process of mining thousands of images from source material supply an infinite fascination. My palette is gathered from printed media, unaltered beyond removal of its embedded periphery. Cutting and pasting, imagery is recycled, re-purposed, re-contextualized. Equal time is spent collecting, selecting, eliminating, and assembling materials.

While narratives cannot help themselves but to be constructed when disparate imaged elements are saddled next to and couched within one another (as collage is want to do), my intention is not to make conclusive thematic statements but to develop an expansive impression about a primarily private dialogue and simultaneously provide a significant visual basis for personal relationship within the viewer while maintaining a sense of play. An intentionality around a lack thematic specificity does not preclude a content  current loosely indicative of identity constructed of amounts and tensions, containment and plurality. Or, Data-ism: the power of images and their combinations.

“Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period. ” -Max Ernst. Quoted in Saranne Alexandrian Surrealist Art (1970).

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