CHRIS FORD OFFICE

Collages

New York NY & Tucson AZ

June 1998—June 2005

In the mid 1990’s, email was becoming the prevalent form of written communication, thereby adversely impacting the culture of exchanged postcards and hand-written notecards.  While email is certainly efficient when one communicates a single message to multiple recipients, it robs its reader from the same emotional satisfaction that comes with receiving personal correspondence in physical form. 

 

These 8” x 8” collages are an attempt to enhance the tactile quality of personal communication.  Various two dimensional graphic material would be saved, categorized and stored according to subject.  This material came from draft plots from architectural offices, reading material, visitor guides, brochures, street team handouts, or boarding pass stubs.  All images would be manipulated physically and the final composition would be arranged at a 1:1 scale using spray adhesive or gluesticks.  Other than using a photocopier for an image enlargement or reduction, no digital resources were used in the creation of the actual collages.

 

 

Subjects for the collages varied between communicating a single event (such as a trip to Roswell NM), or sharing one year’s worth of professional production.  Each collage was sent in a 8.5”x11” envelope using US Mail to a person known to the author.  Furthermore, each collage was sent without any further explanation of communicative intent beyond the recipient’s reading of the received image.

 

Twelve such collages were generated and mailed over a span of seven years.