Hoop & Stick: On Himself

 
I’m often asked, “Why collage?” I can offer a few different explanations, ranging from that one night on mushrooms, to my frustration with wet media, or even my theory that originality is an illusion and that everything is a collage anyway. I tend to tailor my response to whomever is asking the question. Sometimes, I’ll turn one of these explanations into an artist statement or a blurb for some future manifesto – one which I’ll indulge notions of writing in my more megalomaniacal moments. While any of my reasons can suffice on their own, it is only when they are all pasted together that they provide an obvious case for me gravitating almost exclusively toward collage as an art form.

    Pasted together – see what I did there?

I’m something of a generalist – of course I have more acute interests – but overall, I tend to be spread out in regards to what I choose to explore and later utilize in my art. I’ve gone from pen and ink illustration, to screen printing and hand cut stencils, to wire sculpture, to charcoal portraits, and so forth, until I finally settled on collage. My themes are just as varied, but I often settle on philosophical, social, or emotional matters. Of course, even then it is difficult for me to articulate whether I’m being didactic, suggestive, or maybe just posing a question. Sometimes I’m exploring an idea to which I don’t subscribe, but to which I’m not necessarily expressing doubt. I’ve come to decide that this is okay; after all, we love fantasy, but most of us don’t believe in magic and dragons. In this way, certain themes like teleology, existentialism, and immaterial consciousness play out like fiction; they are great storytelling devices. Put another way: if god is my magical dragon, then I’m not always interested in slaying him, as he provides a new thematic well from which I can draw context.

I inwardly cringe when I’m asked about the meaning of a particular piece. Of course I could launch into an explanation of what I was thinking at the time, or what scrap x means when juxtaposed with scrap y, or even give general run-down of the theme. These are all acceptable and expected ways of approaching the question, but I hate giving those explanations. My reasoning is two-fold. Superficially, I worry about sounding pretentious, snobby, or worse—like a stereotypical head-in-the-clouds, all-talk-and-no-work bohemian poser. Underneath that, however, I would really like my work to be read differently by different people. Oh sure, I want to gently lead an individual toward a particular train of thought – and I do that through my title and iconography – but all the air is let out of my balloon as soon as I’m asked to spoon-feed my connotations. I am a firm believer in the postmodern, insofar as art and design is concerned; meaning is subjective, and often viewer-created. This is not to say that an artist can’t potentially create something that means the same thing to a large multitude of people, but often the reading of a piece of artwork or design is culturally (or sub-culturally) bound. To my knowledge, the only universal communication tools that we have as a species are numbers. Everything else has the potential to be subjectively understood. As an artist, I can choose to fight against that, or embrace it. Friends, it is far easier – and much more rewarding – to embrace ambiguity.

— Hoop & Stick