Nostalgia for the Infinite Collage

Square foot 12x12 inch mixed media collage and painting on canvas. Edges painted, ready to hang. Working in the square foot format liberates me to explore old fashioned cut and paste collage along while experimenting with as many other media as possible, including graphite, pastel, acrylic and spray paints, glitter glue, metallic leaf, chalk, pencil crayons, and more. I love words and images and collage is all about eclectic curiosity and the joy of juxtaposition. The unexpected narratives and suggested stories that appear are an act of chance, or of fate; each piece is an unplanned collision of memory, imagination, and fabrication. "A superhuman effort to coalesce the imaginative world." Moray Mair, Mutant Space Arts "Luzajic, like Wonder Woman, is her own institution." Paul Robinson, Blog Critics "Queen of the fantastic." Carrie Shibinsky, Art Bomb Daily Lorette says, "I am driven by eclectic curiosity, and by the joy of juxtaposition. My work is a curiosity cabinet and an apothecary of magic potions and spells. It is poetry, and a surreal dream. It is the frantic pace of the city and the magnificent silence of the night. It is about love and death and the sacred and inane, and the absurdity and beauty in all things." Compared to Rauschenberg, Schwitters, and Basquiat, and inspired by Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Robert Motherwell, and Antoni Tapies, Lorette C. Luzajic wears her influences on her sleeve. Appropriating relentlessly from art history, advertising, music, poetry, fiction, culture, religion, and travel, she plunders everything but creates work that is original and entirely her own. Lorette writes, "A collagist is always looking, always deconstructing and reconstructing. From dentist waiting room magazines to church hymnals to art history masterpieces at the museum to nightclub flyers, my mind is constantly snipping, juxtaposing, discovering, experimenting, replacing, gluing over, scraping back layers, recontextualizing." Lorette's use of materials reflects the same montage quality as the varied concepts that inspire her. She uses acrylic paint, gouache paint, watercolour, spray paint, ink, fabric paint, chalk pastel, oil stick, oil pastel, crayons, pencil crayons, graphite, found papers, found photographs, found images, house paint, plaster, silicone, pen, markers, cosmetics, glues, stickers, and any other media she can incorporate. Lorette studied for and received a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in journalism, but went on to focus on creative work in visual art, photography, poetry, and writing about art. She is the editor of The Ekphrastic Review at www.ekphrastic.net, a journal dedicated exclusively to literature inspired by visual artwork. She has published hundreds of her own poems and stories in nearly 200 magazines, journals and blogs, as well as a dozen books of poetry or essays on art, life, and interesting people. She teaches workshops on ekphrastic writing and on art without drawing. Her visual art shows regularly at home in Toronto, Canada, including at the Spoke Club, the Gladstone Hotel, Artusiasm Gallery, the Flying Pony Gallery, the Ritz Carlton, the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, the Toronto Artist Project, Hashtag Gallery, Project Gallery, and more. She has also shown work further afield, including Brisbane, Bristol, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, New York, and more. She recently participated in an international artists symposium in Tunisia, working to create paintings for the Ministry of Culture and to show in two exhibitions in Tunis and Hammamet. She also visited Mexico recently for a duet exhibition at Le Cirque Galeria in Merida, Yucatan and a number of group shows at other venues. In March of 2018, Lorette took the top $5000 award for an art contest sponsored by E11even Restaurant and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. Her mixed media paintings have found homes all over the world, and hang in collections alongside originals by Miro, Erte, Dubuffet, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Dine, Jane Ash Poitras, and Benjamin Chee Chee. www.mixedupmedia.ca View a short documentary about my work from Val Peter and Kyle Robinson at Artists Unknown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbLL94Abd4k&t=39s All works on stretched canvas are ready to hang with edges painted and back wired. Works on unstretched canvas that ship rolled up in a tube can be stretched locally or on site, though some clients prefer the raw, urban aesthetic of hanging as is with nails through canvas edges.