Shannon Czaja
Chicago, IL
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My paintings are structured by photographic collage elements and intuitively painted with oil in-between the collage to connect the images. Using my own photographs, I cut them into pieces and reassemble them onto the surface thinking about how these images could be reconnected with oil paint. I do not paint over the collage, but connect the imagery together by color matching the oil paint to the color and elements in the collage, thus creating a new and surreal image. In a sense, I am transforming the original photographic structure into a new form. This process connects with my themes of the cyclical nature of life and death and how, upon death, new life is born. In thermodynamic laws of the universe, energy is never lost or created, but recycled in the process of life and death. I use images of preserved, once living structures such as bones, shells, or animals that would be found in a public or natural history museum to recreate life from a deceased form.