Diary of an Artist: Entry 23

Entry Twenty-Three
April 15, 2008

I have been working on plenty of little projects recently. Today, though, I submitted artwork to a Seattle venue. Here was my artist statement:

Mental Entropy
By Christine Stoddard

Mental Entropy is a collection of 20 collages, both traditionally and digitally assembled, by Christine Stoddard. The pieces feature a combination of Stoddard's drawings and photographs, as well as magazine and newspaper clippings. Occasionally, the works utilize other sources such as Internet images, nail polish, cellophane, and paint. Most of the works, especially the ones that ultimately became digital pieces, involved a multi-step process of finding source material, scanning it, copying and pasting the resulting images onto Adobe Photoshop and/or Illustrator, and then editing it---sometimes pixel by pixel.

For a period of about five years in her life (age 14-19), Stoddard spent many nights over-thinking. Sometimes these thoughts were uselessly worrisome. Other times, they were productive or, at the very least, entertaining. Eventually this habit became more regular and even led to insomnia. The less Stoddard slept, the less the world made sense and the more she wanted to change it or, if that proved too difficult, escape it. The direct correlation between her amount of rest and how logical everything seemed had a clear impact on her artwork. Collages she produced during this mini-era reveal her thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, but she mainly focused on social constructions. Issues of gender and religious roles are, and remain, two of some of her biggest concerns.

Stoddard selected twenty of her favorite pieces from this period in her life for Mental Entropy. All of the pieces have been at least somewhat altered from their original forms in order to fit the mood and style Stoddard envisioned for this collection. This collection can also be broken down into sub-sets for smaller exhibit spaces.