About ‘Your Secrets As Exhibition’
Through my past research, I developed a style of collaged typographic collage that comes from my own obsession with personal privacy as an artist. My earlier typographic collages were made by taking a confession of my own, scrambling the letters, and collaging the type and imagery together. Displayed on public gallery walls, the typographic colleges were perfectly legible to me, unreadable to any other viewer, and were a way for me to creatively express intimate or personal ideas in a way that protected my privacy through cryptic or ciphered type.
However, my desire for privacy backfired; scrambling and obscuring my confession only drew more curious attention and further prying into my personal life from the viewers. This unexpected reaction lead me to completely reexamine my own and other's intrusive gaze, an obsession with understanding “the truth” of visual arts, and my fascination with the want to read something more if there are implications that it shouldn’t be read.
The collages above are apart of a series titled “Your Secrets As Exhibition” (2025); a project conceptualized through that unexpected reaction from the viewers of my earlier works. Rather than using my own confessions in this series, the typography of each collage comes from and spells out anonymously submitted confession of members of Fort Lewis College and community members of Durango, Colorado. Started as a critique of the boundary between an audience of observation and intrusion, this project proved to be a uniquely intimate and complex collaboration between myself as an artist, and the anonymous collaborators who submitted confessions.
Along with the 7 collages, I created a corresponding, handmade magazine that can be read here.
The magazine is a step-by-step guide to collage that details the research, writing, technical process, and unexpected emotional toll of this series. The first 50 copies of the printed magazines were distributed for free at the opening show of the exhibition where this series was first displayed.
