50 Lovers EV 17/50
In my own journey of self love, I have explored my sexuality and well as the ways in which I wish to be loved. This body of work is a homage to my most memorable lovers. I have experimented with multiple personality types, loved hard, contemplated my many failures, and tried to understand the lessons of each experience. Even when the relationships were painful, I have emerged with lessons about what to avoid in the future. Every individual was a unique ride, and here I interpret them through my lens of jaded love and abstraction.
This body of work consists of 50 individualized prints created from shapes that were cut from my monotype designs, each arranged into a unique composition. The process began with the printing of the full monotype sheets in a range of colors. The sheets were then cut down into collections of stylized shapes, and these shapes are repeated throughout the entire print edition. Each composition is arranged, pinned together, assembled with archival glue, and finally, printed via chine collé onto blank white paper with a copper plate, giving the final piece the appearance of a painting.
This body of work was inspired in 2015 by a visit to a groundbreaking exhibit of Henri Matisse’s cut outs at the Museum of Modern Art. I was tremendously moved by his approach to creating color sheets and the vocabulary of each of his signature shapes. Soon afterwards, I began my own cutout series from my unique hand printed colored sheets. This series was my first round of experiments, all studies completed in a small format. The monotype collages gradually began to become larger and larger.
