My work attempts to create environments that I want to find in myself: they represent internal worlds that I am attempting to externalize and share. My pieces are minimal and balanced, yet full of rhythm and asymmetry. However life’s beauty is expressed, however it is felt, has to do with a feeling of calm, inside and out. I love what the late jazz musician Charlie Haden said: “The artist’s job is to bring beauty into a conflicted world.”

Tracey Adams

After decades of working in collage, this series is one of the first in which I’ve included linear elements. The challenges within each piece brought to mind the story of Theseus following Ariadne’s thread out of the Labyrinth.

Lisa Hochstein

For this current body of work, Goodwill, I visited second-hand stores in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. At these locations, I gathered overheard bits of conversation, which I then carefully recorded sequentially by hand into a notebook. I also photographed the rows of clothing in the stores as a record of my visual experience.

I placed the conversations and visual imagery together. While visiting the stores I was intrigued by how the clothing was arranged by color and pattern. I also enjoyed the effort that the workers in these second-hand stores took to create these beautiful arrangements. My grandparents who were immigrants to America from Eastern Europe inspired this current body of work. They made a meager income by working with fabric. My grandmother sewed and my grandfather sold fabric remnants. As a child when I visited them in Brooklyn I remember being fascinated with the variety of fabrics they had in their bedroom closet. It was fun sorting through all the fabric remnants with my grandmother, one that I will never forget. As a child, I of course didn’t realize how hard they worked and that the fabric I was playing with represented their livelihood.

Claire Lerner

While paper dartboard make up the bulk of the raw material in my work, I sometimes combine other materials like squares and rectangles cut from skateboard decks or strips cut from corrugated cardboard. In this series I combine all three, dartboard, corrugated cardboard and skateboard pieces. I like that the corrugated pattern echoes the rhythmic pattern on the dartboard striips. The skateboard elements provide structure and act as a foil to the horizontal and vertical strips.

Will Marino 2024

My mixed-media work explores concepts around time, deterioration and human complexity. A fascination from a young age with old photographs, books, tools and utilitarian objects, along with the study of art history and photography, directed me to an art making process focused on repurposing materials first made by others.

Materials that are worn, that have lived lives, rather than remaining untouched, have deeper stories to tell. Exploring these objects exposes hidden information and encourages me to acknowledge ephemerality. Ultimately the artistic process begins with deconstructing books–where I might find hidden bindings or unexpected love notes, listening to the ripping linen and feeling the old papers in my hands. The experience of finding, touching and exploring these materials becomes an important part of how I then decide to reconstruct them into a collage.

Julia Nelson-Gal

In her collages, Catie O’Leary uses original engraved illustrations from antique books. The books are her inspiration as well as her material. She intuitively gravitates toward images that interest her. They become a continuous thread throughout the years of an invented nature. The meticulously cut-out parts become puzzle pieces in her selection process creating a chain of associations. The resulting collages become their own visual story. The unexpected juxtapositions of birds, animals, drapery, architecture and scientific objects become poetic landscapes examining the relationship between the natural and human worlds.

Through pilgrimage to places of historical and psychological impact, I have collected a vast library of images that I use to travel between the present and the past, connecting the dots of humanity’s magnificent opportunities and repeated mistakes.

My work explores these ideas in a wide variety of media, through physical processes as well as the use of specific imagery. As physical layers of collaged materials are added, they are also scratched and carved through, revealing, and obscuring the imagery, until the piece looks as though it was conceived as a three-dimensional object, rather than something painted on a surface. Narratives are built through juxtapositions of time, space, and location.

Robynn Smith