maría martínez-cañas

the website of maría martínez-cañas reads like a retrospective. her many series of work are archived in full and organized chronologically. there is also a comprehensive section of essays that i found very satisfying.

i just wish i had known about this work or read the following excerpt when i was working on my thesis:

photomontage (and its sometimes indistinguishable partner, collage) has proven itself an ideal instrument for radical esthetic thinking, political commentary and protest, advertising design, and even pure formalism. Coincidentally, many of the artists associated with its modern practices were at one time refugees, exiles, or expatriates, among them moholy, man ray, max ernst, herbert bayer, and r. b. kitaj. martínez-cañas has said of her own photomontages that they focus on issues of identity and attempt “to create new memories that have to do with who I am.” The linkage is not hard to grasp. memory is itself a kind of montage, a fragmentary, selective quilt of impressions and experiences from which we fashion a history of ourselves. what photomontage does is assemble diverse images into a larger, integral whole that has its own identity as an image; memory does much the same, creating an integral sense of identity out of the fragments of the past.

-- andy grundberg

i layer my imagery in camera, but the sentiment still fits.

above, hortus x; below, opuestos