Collage Is Both Pouring Cement Into My Breath/Erasing My Singularity

In preparing for my first gallery exhibition, it has been challenging to titrate my intentions into a singular statement. The work that was chosen to summate my nearly decade-long career insofar as a collage artist largely represents journey, community, and togetherness. To be a collage artist has meant so many things to me; archivism, journalism, recyclomancy, deconstruction, coalescence. This collection of work is in part intended to offer a lens to my interpolation on collage. This medium, which offers so much revitalization, somatic therapy and genuine artistic innovation, also comes at such a minimal cost in an increasingly expensive world. Much of my goal as a collage artist is to reveal just how much the medium offers, and accessibly so, to prospective artists, or those who are unable to meet the sometimes herculean barrier of entry into art.

After spending 5 years living in Buffalo, amidst the oscillating seasons and the different types of inspiration they bring, I can attribute most all of my history in collage to this land. In many ways, I was removing myself from the life I had built when I moved to Buffalo; a pseudo-living form of collage. This was the first city where I found myself utilizing the tools that are now a daily extension of self: scissors, glue, paper. This was the first city I found myself as an artist. The community, the architecture, the vibrant and cutting urge to create that is found ubiquitously throughout the city, it is something to preserve. The title of this gallery seeks to explore the permanent structures of self that get deposited throughout one’s life. So many of these pieces were created or ideologically incepted within the borders of Buffalo, and I can think of no better place than to debut myself as a galleried artist than the city that molded me into a collage artist.

Every piece in this exhibition is part of a serial approach to reclaimed media. Each of these works was created using varying books (mostly in the children’s genre for their superior textures and colors), scissors, gluestick, and basic paper. Each series (outside of the athletics series) is composed of a singular source, and each piece is a singular page from that source, deconstructed to its constituent geometries and hues, and then chaotically and improvisationally reorganized into a shape that has yet to exist. The resultant shape is an emblem of the now, something that says what I can’t, as honestly and as raw as I can convey. The collection is my own way of building a totem pole to iconicize and insigniate both my macro and micro personal experiences of surviving under capital oppression. This approach indicates removing so much of my own intention as to what I am seeking to create. The process in so many ways is the project of preservation, of preserving myself, and these books that would have been dead on the sidewalk in Queens. Each of these works survive as a breadcrumb of that journey.

To be an artist in America, one is intrinsically linked to individualism, and definition. To be a Kurd, however, regardless of the two generations I am removed from those mountains, has always translated to nomadicism, but more specifically, the ambiguous shade of nomadicism. To have to leave with no destination, to have to move with no impetus to do so, to have to compact life down to a bindle and find a new way just because you are being forced out; these integral facets of post-emigration Kurdish existence in turn force another lens onto my art as well. The generational traumas we have faced, and remained through, have not been given proper attention, and this series seeks to represent a post-linguistic library of cultural expression. These shapes, as well as our stories, have rarely, often never, been seen, being far too nuanced to be replicable. In seeking this, my work regains so much of its immediate intention. As I continue to survive, and create, along with my works, so does the Kurdish tradition of greatness and togetherness, no matter how far we are spread out. As I continue to work, and explore, and destroy, and recreate, I, along with all post-removal Kurdish artists, am helping define the pre-unification culture of the hyphenated Kurds dispersed around the globe.

Host or Publisher Nick Mass