ARTIST STATEMENT
Until recently my work has been all digital, but I'm currently exploring analog collage as well. My style is strongly influenced by my being reared on fairy tales and the way imagination and reality grew to work together for me.
I’ve been teaching myself Photoshop for about 20 years now and use it to make my digital collage. My digital work features women who evoke longing and wistfulness. They are usually placed against backdrops just outside reality... my way of asserting imagination’s role in life. To me these works reflect the discomfort of isolation and how your self-concept can be a trap. They’re also about a desire to show your colors, be known and understood. Making and sharing these images has had incredible value for me. I love how art allows you to skip small talk with the viewer and goes straight to the depths.
For my paper collage I use vintage ephemera (mostly Life magazines at the moment), and art books. There’s been a coincidental shift in theme in moving from digital to paper. Besides plenty of practice pieces, I’m working through a theme of unrest… the idea of your intimate space, ‘home’, being a little autoimmune and not a place of comfort and rejuvenation.
It is my goal to bring a sense of honesty and vulnerability to each collage. It is important to me that I've injected them with something beyond aesthetics to offer the viewer. I know a collage is finished because there is a resonance and I often get a little lost in the piece, reading it and getting pleasure from what it can now say on its own.
ARTIST BIO
Jennie Mejan is a self-taught collage artist from North Carolina, USA. Her collage work is a culmination of skills from previous forays into poetry, photography, and graphic design. Her best spare time is spent somewhere under a tree, near a moving body of water.