Mister Koppa
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Mister Koppa STATEMENT My collages are driven by intuition. Born with a nostalgic heart, I am attracted to commercially printed images, often predating the information age. Through free association amidst a patiently and thoughtfully selected library of source material, I stumble upon surprising relationships and juxtapositions, which may mean something or nothing, but always satisfy my craving for amusement. Art is the relationship of things in a space, and collage is the art of surprise. My creative process begins with the selection of source material (vintage encyclopedic books, antique prints, magazines, etc.). I then cut a number of aesthetically or symbolically related images from each, leaving myself with a puzzle that has no given solution. Using the images gathered, I create several collages at once, challenging myself to compose multiple visual dramas of related imagery. This results in a unified series that can be arranged sequentially to tell a story. After each collage is fine-tuned, it is permanently assembled, sometimes with acrylic mediums and varnish on Masonite, other times carefully stitched to cotton mat board with bees’ waxed bookbinding thread. I consider all art to be a valuable means of communication, but it is difficult, even for me, to understand exactly what my collages are communicating. I begin with no intention to say anything. Ultimately, my collages are nothing more than evidence of creative activity. However, in much the same way as a viewer might, I look for meaning in each collage when it is finished. The introspective analysis is always pleasurable and surprising. It is therapeutic exercise, and it comes naturally, from within. BIO Mister Koppa grew up fascinated with drawing and lettering, creatively covering his schoolbooks, notebooks, and folders, and reveling in the art of sign making in his family’s grocery store. With a personal focus on graphic design in a department focused on fine art, he earned his B.S. in Art from the University of Wisconsin in 1991, where he was introduced to book making, letterpress printing, and collage. Upon returning to the family grocery store after college, he applied his childhood interest in drawing and lettering with his a new interest in the book format and collage to create twenty issues of the world’s first grocery fanzine, The Sphere, (1993 – 1995). In the years that followed, he acquired the letterpress equipment and began printing and publishing books by writers with ties to his home state of Wisconsin. His collages were first publicly hung in a two-person exhibition at the Charles Allis Museum of Art in Milwaukee in 1997. Koppa left the family grocery store in 2001 to adventurously pursue life as an artist, and in 2004 he found employment as a graphic designer for an organic farmers’ cooperative based in Wisconsin’s driftless region. Seven years later, he resigned from that position to run a cemetery lettering business, and now cuts the death dates into the cemetery stones within a 60-mile radius around his home in Viroqua, Wisconsin. Mister Koppa lives with his wife of fifteen years and two daughters on a dead end street with a good view of the stars. He parks his 1984 Moto Guzzi in a one-car garage, waiting for opportunities to ride it to the family’s 4-acre wooded hillside retreat, where he practices prairie restoration and permaculture, reads, writes, plays cards, drinks beer, jumps on the trampoline, and observes the living, changing natural world. ARTIST CONTACT [click to email] IMAGES
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