Medium Specificity: Leave Your Cares Behind

Medium specificity is a term which discusses emphasizing or exploring the defining characteristics of a given medium. For this piece I chose to explore the collage. I enjoy how in a collage things can coexist in ways that might be difficult to pull of otherwise. Mixed materials might be employed, or sense of perspective distorted, and objects might be placed together in strange juxtapositions. Granted, these concepts exist in many other types of media--sculpture, photography, drawing--but only in collage are they physically part of the creation, a clear border delineating where one thing ends and another begins.

Mike Alcantara’s Atom, for instance, showcases pieces of comics remade into a comic homage of sorts. Layers of meaning and information are left in layers, and can be perceived at different depths. A beginning close-up look reveals words, pictures and stories. A step back reduces these to splotches of color and texture, revealing a different image.

It is interesting to me that even though the individual pieces are easily identified as coming from separate sources, they manage to form a new meaning through juxtaposition, where the whole is different than the sum of its parts. I do not mean "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,"  where 2+2=5, not 4. I mean it is different. In collage, 2+2=potato, maybe, or 2+2=The Shining.

This particular aspect of collage, then, is what I have emphasized. (In the interest of focus I have decided not to use media such as macaroni noodles and stickers in this particular piece to avoid too much visual clutter.) An elderly bride and groom stand too large in a desert landscape, unknowingly pasted over a much smaller, younger, proportionate couple of newlyweds. An Italian pasta frolla rises luminously behind them like the desert sun, so out of place it somehow fits.  Stopping at this point would have yielded a 2+2= a strange, but harmonious, maybe slightly awkward scene. Yet a couple of things were missing. The addition of Jacob and Edward's faces--adolescently sultry in their former wholeness, discomfiting in their current, incomplete state--change the whole tone of the piece. 2+2= something very different. I enjoy having words in the picture itself. According to Scott McCloud, this is the “additive combination where words amplify or elaborate on an image or vice versa.” The suggestion to "leave your cares behind" acts as an artistic lacquer, sealing in the (decidedly creepy) tone of the piece.