Celia Crane

Celia Crane
Rochester, New York, USA

STATEMENT

My art practice is highly experimental and largely unpremeditated. I source imagery from a wide variety of modern and vintage publications as well as domestically-foraged ephemera such as food wrappers, discard books and instruction manuals. Though my collage compositions are primarily hand-cut and 2-dimensional, my growing interest in assemblage has necessitated regular dumpster dives and an expanded tool kit that includes cement, castoff toys and a host of other improvised dimensional components. With each wave of trial and error I find myself transported to a liminal space between chaos and transcendence, emerging from each exploration with fresh information. In this way, making collage feels like a continuous act of becoming. Recurrent themes in my work include identity crisis, the ills of society, the search for satori, and the insufferable cling of traumatic memory. Collage allows me to transform my lifelong obsession with the materiality of scraps into a feeling of stasis by marrying seemingly incongruent bits together.

BIO

Celia Crane is a collage artist, writer and independent curator who left a decades-long marketing career in 2019 to concentrate on creative work. In April 2020 she created Vayo, the first dedicated collage gallery in Rochester, New York. Since then she has collaborated with hundreds of collage artists from around the world to expand the public’s knowledge and appreciation of the collage medium. Invigorated by the materiality and potentiality of scraps, Crane creates her offbeat analog collages from the vast supply of printed material and ephemera she amassed over a lifetime of collecting. Her work has been published by Cut Me Up, Kolaj, and Hınç magazines as well as by Paris Collage Collective, Collage Lab and Fragmented Collective. In summer 2020, her collage It’s Hard to See the Picture When You’re Inside the Frame became a permanent part of the historic Kanyer Art Collection.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.celiacrane.com

IMAGES