Junkmail Collages
Artist Statement
As a poet, appropriation and collage have always been my primary mode. Distilling and transforming text. Layering and arranging text. My poetic interests have also leaned towards the visual arts: typography, page-space, dirty minimalism.
These junkmail collages were intended as a daily practice. Use only what falls through the mail slot. Be attentive to the rips and stains and bruises the paper incurred in its travels. Listen to the bright solicitous words, and offer something in return.
I’ve made hundreds of these 8×10 inch pieces: line and color studies, whimsical juxtapositions, visual puns, cut-up poems. This selection of six images represents a particular cross-section of the collection’s aesthetic and emotional range.
Matthew Klane has an MA in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His books include Canyons (w/ James Belflower, Flimb Press 2016), Che (Stockport Flats 2013), and B (Stockport Flats 2008). An e-chapbook from Of the Day is online at Delete Press, an e-book My is online at Fence Digital, and a chapbook Poetical Sketches is available from The Magnificent Field. Recent collages can be found online in Afternoon Visitor, Barzakh, Feral Dove, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and at IceFloe Press. He lives, writes, and glues paper onto paper in Albany, NY. See: matthewklane.com.
