CC. Contemporary Collage Magazine
Sometimes I need something that pulls me out of my comfort zone. That’s when I join a challenge. This time I took part in the Vintage Magazine Challenge hosted by Contemporary Collage Magazine. They provided around 30 vintage issues of U&lc Magazine for participants to work with. My task was to create a collage using only materials from the magazine, mounted on a surface of my choice so I went for two wooden panels.
When the U&lc magazine I was working with was published, I was fifteen and about to grow up. Engaging with this old magazine brought back unexpected memories of that period in life. Desktop publishing, a field I later studied, was still new and full of promise. I was fascinated as I flipped through its pages, where typographic innovation met the analogue world of art — like the masks by Marshall Arisman, and the haunting drawings of Judith Mason that where used for my collages.
On the collage Dead Fly I used an old ad for Font House — it had the most disturbing copy I’ve ever read in advertising. It says:
Take a dead Fly, one killed by drowning. Place it in a glass full of water, and cover it up so as to deprive the fly from all air. When the fly becomes motionless, take it out, put it in the sun, and cover it wiht salt. In about two minutes, it will come to life and fly away. The fly may have been dead for twenty-four hours.
In between those disturbing lines, there’s some text about how to bring copy to life with the right typography, which you could buy at Font House.
In my collages Dead Fly and What’s New, mounted on an old wooden plate, I aim to merge these two worlds and give each the attention it deserves.
