Essays on assemblage, material intelligence, creative process, and the quiet art of paying attention.
Public Art Isn’t a Billboard Why contemporary work asks for your time, not your approval People get cranky about public art when it doesn’t deliver in two seconds. No familiar scene, no favorite colors, no clear “message” — verdict in,…
At Moody Gallery, *MANUAL: The Collaboration of Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, 1974–2024* unfolds as a sustained inquiry into how images hold, distort, and transmit knowledge across time. Working through books, archives, and evolving technologies, MANUAL treats photography less as documentation and more as a recursive system—one that reframes memory, reference, and perception through layered acts of mediation.
This essay considers how their work resists linear interpretation, instead operating through accumulation, citation, and visual recursion. Positioned alongside FotoFest 2026, the exhibition offers a model for thinking about images not as endpoints, but as active sites of cultural and technological negotiation—where meaning is continuously reassembled rather than fixed.
Mixed media and assemblage are often conflated, but they operate on different structural and philosophical levels. One expands a surface; the other constructs a body in space. The distinction shapes how work is made, read, and collected.
A behind-the-scenes look at my assemblage studio process, from found objects to finished artwork shaped by history, form, and repair.
In-studio process: integrating reclaimed materials and electronic components into an assemblage work. People often ask why I use found objects in my artwork. Why not start fresh with clean materials: new lumber, perfect hardware, store-bought components? Why search through old…
What Is Assemblage Art? (A Simple Explanation)** Assemblage art is one of those forms people recognize immediately but struggle to describe. They’ll say “found object,” “mixed media,” “junk sculpture,” or “collage, but 3D.” All close, but not quite right. Assemblage…
