11. The Joyful Bewilderment, Nick White, 2008 12. Person Pitch: Panda Bear, Agnes Montgomery, 2007. Courtesy of Paw Tracks. 13. The End (1), Matthew Rose, 2008 it for so long time, since the late 70s. But I do realise it is part of the mainstream now, everyone is armed with scissors. Sometimes I want to disarm them.” Junk Modelling Martin O’Neill has been working as an illustrator and collage artist since 1995 and in that time has amassed a vast archive of found images, text and ephemera. He catalogues his collection in his studio by using a labeling system to house his graphic archive. His collection includes secondhand books, albums and scrapbooks, found type, magazines and encyclopedias, found paper, record sleeves, all kept lovingly in filing cabinets, boxes, shelving units and pigeon holes. If the digital gurus of the mid 1990s were to be believed, O’Neill’s distinctly analogue methodology should now be a thing of the past. However, he is as busy as ever. A resurgence in the ‘hand-made’ aesthetic allows artists such as O’Neill to use the computer in their work (mainly exploiting the scanner and printer) in the same way previous generations exploited the photocopier, PMT camera or fax machine. The mantra of the smart collagist is “the computer is only a tool, use it. Don’t let it use you.” The danger is, that in the race to dig up the next historically overlooked image to cut, paste, mix, fuse, alter and rework, the meaning of the original image is lost. Or the meaning was never understood in the first place. So while the power of Google Images may appear to provide an almost limitless selection of images, it rarely yields anything of quality. O’Neill describes his working process as “making connections between the elements I use, it’s like being a one-man band with lots of instruments, but no sheet music.” But as much as collage is about interpretation as making connections, it is also about interpretation as conflict. British artist John Stezaker has been collecting found images for decades, which he then collages in subtle ways to create challenging images. Stezarker had his first solo show in 1970, and has always been an outsider, but the art world has shown a recent surge of interest in his work. Stezaker is interested in the conflict and encounter in the juxtaposition of two images, and the third-meaning that emerges. Stezarker explains, “I had decided that I did not want to add to the world of images but only to intervene in what was already there.” He often carves away at and reduces the photographs he works with to give an un-nerving edge to formerly quaint portraits of movie stars from the 1940s and 1950s. The art critic Elizabeth Manchester wrote, “the stills from those films tap deeply into a collective nostalgia that contributes significantly to the expressive, even expressionistic register of the work. For Stezaker this nostalgia derives from childhood memories of being outside of the cinema, looking in towards a world he could not, because of his age, gain access.” He was looking in on filmic scenes that would come to shape his future as an artist. John Stezaker’s collage work feels wistful for a certain lost time in the past, his use of Ladybird book illustrations (The series Flash 2007) and film stills from the 1960’s enforce this. The images are then dissected in a violent manner to shake us from our cosy, nostalgic dreams. Compositions of Time For the last twenty years or so the use of the photocopy machine, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and After Effects has pushed collage into the mainstream through print, magazines, video and animation. Going back to 1995, Kyle Cooper’s celebrated title sequence for David Fincher's Se7en again influenced a whole host of designers and collage artists and the area of the moving image, film and TV is now ripe for reworking by collage Artists. The recent title sequence for True Blood, designed by Alan Ball at Digital Kitchen has over 65 shots comprised of original documentary, studio, table- 12 13 The Future is Junk 47
48 14. Snakeskin Face James Dawe, 2009 15. The Cribs, Nick Scott, 2009 16. Elephant Ride, Peter Quinnell, 2009 17. Flash VIII, John Stezaker, 2008, Courtesy The Approach, London 14
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