Art On Its Best Misbehavior

My collage work is built from glamour, dread, absurdity, desire, and cute little creatures that look like they know something bad about you.

I’m drawn to over-the-top, sweet-rot nostalgia: old advertisements, pinups, recipes, domestic scenes, animals, flowers, outer space, and the strange optimism of midcentury visual culture. Collage allows me to corrupt the story to reveal tension lurking underneath.

Humor is usually the bait. Glamour is the disguise. The unease is the point.

Text plays a major role in my work, probably because I’m also a copywriter. The words in my collages act like captions, heckles, spells, threats, punchlines, or intrusive thoughts. Sometimes they clarify the image. Sometimes they make everything worse.

I earned my BFA in photography from SCAD, where much of my work centered on digital collage. After years of focusing primarily on writing, I returned to visual art through handmade and multimedia collage — back to the place where my instincts first made sense.

At its core, my work is about the strange little truth inside an image: the thing that makes it funny, unsettling, seductive, or just wrong enough to feel alive.

Abi Grise Morgan