| I sit at a big wooden table and piece together fragments of the world around me. My goal is to pause a moment in time just long enough for examination. As today’s world edges closer to chaos, and we are inundated with imagery and information, the centuries-old art form of collage is more relevant than ever. It can freeze the madness, and shuffle its meaning. I entered the arena of mixed media accidentally, and quickly realized that I was onto something. The combination of knife, paper, and glue, and my urge for expression, yielded surprising results. This medium became an immediate way of channeling and processing the beauty, ugliness, solitude, and desire that I saw swirling past me in my life in New York. My constructed scenes often focus on personal space, physical relationships, and enigmatic situations. Within my imagery I investigate human form and personal identity. |  |
James Gallagher
I sit at a big wooden table and piece together fragments of the world around me. My goal is to pause a moment in time just long enough for examination. As today’s world edges closer to chaos, and we are inundated with imagery and information, the centuries-old art form of collage is more relevant than ever. It can freeze the madness, and shuffle its meaning. I entered the arena of mixed media accidentally, and quickly realized that I was onto something. The combination of knife, paper, and glue, and my urge for expression, yielded surprising results. This medium became an immediate way of channeling and processing the beauty, ugliness, solitude, and desire that I saw swirling past me in my life in New York. My constructed scenes often focus on personal space, physical relationships, and enigmatic situations. Within my imagery I investigate human form and personal identity. I tend to obscure individual features, traits, and even genders, focusing more on subtle gestures and physical actions, often intimate, sometimes even questionable. These human dramas are where my storylines live; the scenes are layered from shreds of real life. I collect my photographic imagery from such places as recycled vintage books, sex manuals, clothing catalogs, and anything else that can be folded into my world. With a combination of calculated moves and unrehearsed accidents, my scraps find each other and solidify. The forms come together rapidly since my impatient style is to grab materials within reach and manipulate with quick bursts of cutting and pasting. This spontaneous process often generates raw, emotional images that excite and move me. Ultimately I hope to capture a fleeting moment that feels natural (or unnatural), and then leave it up to the viewer to decide its significance.
