The Corrections in Collage

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Artist statement:

As an English and creative-writing teacher, my focus is collage and its potential to visually represent literary texts. I came to visual art without formal training as an escape from the constraints imposed by the training that I received in fiction writing. Ten years ago, I decided I would create a collage to correspond to every page of my favorite novel, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001). The 550+ collages in The Corrections in Collage, now completed, are analog rather than digital, offering an abstract representation of each page's content. More broadly, they represent the variation in each individual's reading experience based on their unique attendant associations, the colorful worlds evoked in the imagination by black text on a white page. Each collage incorporates fragments of text from its corresponding novel page. The component pieces and layers encourage looking more closely at what lies beneath the surface of the written text. Collage as a form for this project also represents the value of finding personal connections to literature, including my experience of recognizing pieces of myself in the novel’s different characters—of being "kaleidoscoped" across them. I believe The Corrections has a special place in literary history due to its publication coinciding with 9/11 and its reflection of an era and culture that collapsed that day, dramatizing the trends and attitudes that contributed to that collapse. The print materials in the composition of the collages—predominantly glossy magazines—underscore the novel's connection to this millennial turning point toward the digital revolution.