The Collage Work of Clea Christakos-Gee

By Heather Canlas Rigg

H: Hi Clea, it’s been so nice to spend time with your collage work, and to chat with you about our shared love of the medium. You have been collaging images since your early teens. Today, you approach your collage practice through intuition, meditation and desire. Can you share a bit about the role collage has played for you as an artist over the years, and your series twenty-twenty?

C: Hi Heather. Such a pleasure to connect with you. I really admire your curatorial practice, which is its own collage. 

I collect, cut, and compose photo collages that live together in hand-bound zines. Since childhood I have gathered these found image fragments from vintage fashion and photography magazines. 

I agree, my approach is intuitive and sometimes diaristic. I often think about symbols of desire and gendered representations in visual culture. I get inspired by the incidental and subconscious themes that emerge by layering images from many contexts. 

My residency with FPN provided an inspiring circle of perspectives steeped in intersectional feminism. Through my participation, I produced a new body of work titled Twenty Twenty, a commitment to a daily collage practice. During the pure uncertainty of the first lockdown I was recovering from a hospitalization and this practice was a way to chart my sense of time and psychological states.

“Photography feels very external, working with others and being out in the world. Whereas collage and bookmaking feels more private and reflective.”

H: I am really drawn to the formal aspects of your collages, which are made up of intimately sized images that I want to describe as amorphous, mostly rounded shapes, void of the rigidity of straight lines and grids. I especially love your series Spin The Bottle, which emphasizes circularity through a clock-like layout. Tell me about your approach to formalism and shapes.

C: Thank you, I love your description. 

With Spin The Bottle I was thinking about trusting elements of chance and the delicacy of group dynamics. The game is like a circle for testing intimacy, risk, sensuality, and secrecy. Hovering somewhere between childish play and adult commitments. 

The rounded shapes come from the gesture of cutting pictures off the page, I follow the lines of the detail I am drawn to with an X-acto blade. Some images become abstracted while others pop out like clues. You may recognize a glossy eyelid, a bone, a winding snake, a flame, or a string of pearls… but I would be happy if you saw something else entirely.

H: For the Feminist Photography Network’s online exhibition your work is part of Connection–with the other two groupings being Identity and Place–how does the word resonate with you in terms of your practice?

C: Collage is all about making and breaking connections, so it feels right to me. 

My relation to feminism is also deeply rooted in connection. Informed by my connection to other female-identified humans, to my body, my privilege and my positionality. I am very inspired by shared archives of feminism and craft. It feels important to reflect on the beauty + complexity + continuity + gaps across generations of feminist art practices.

Photography has also brought so much meaningful connection to my life. The camera can bring you places and bond you to people. I feel lucky for the access and collaborations the medium has granted me. 


H: Your practice has many aspects to it and you balance various modes of working. Your collage practice, your exhibition In The Third, which was on view at Alliance Francaise, your book After Grapefruit, and you do a lot of fashion and commercial photography including portraits (elements of which we can see in the FPN’s exhibition). Can you share how you approach and balance the varied elements of your practice and life as a full time artist and photographer?
 

C: It is a balancing act for sure. My practice straddles lens-based and craft-based approaches, but it is only in recent years that I have shown collage and photography work together. I am curious about how they communicate. 

Photography feels very external, working with others and being out in the world. Whereas collage and bookmaking feels more private and reflective. So maybe they complement one another because of the different energies and modes of working they require. 

My commercial work is a job. Sometimes it dominates my time and other times it feeds my personal work. Portraiture and fashion photography have connected me with many creative people who motivate me to keep making. Boundaries can help… you do so much, what is your secret?

H: I like your use of the word, external. Like photography, curating can feel very external because you are working with so many different people, who all have different needs, but in the end are working towards the same thing. The private/reflective (internal) part, for me, is the research process which I enjoy immensely, and the writing process. Boundaries are a must, but I know we all struggle to enact them, they seem more elusive and murkier to me now that I work from home so much. 

Earlier we talked about how you have been collaging since your teens. Can you talk about the process of incorporating your collage work into your practice?

C: I am attached to the medium of collage because it allows me to play with the materiality of photography and speak visually. I crave this physical, crafty engagement, it feels so good to work with photographs detached from screens and the internet. 

It has always co-existed with my love for photography. I guess I began to embrace that I have an interdisciplinary brain. 

Thank you Heather, for your thoughtful questions, it means so much to have your eyes on my work.


H: It’s been a pleasure to look!
 

Heather Canlas Rigg is a curator and writer based in Toronto.