by featured artist Luda Pahl

Framed
Medium: Mixed media collage

I am a collage artist, working mainly with mixed media. As I have a background in couture dressmaking and design, I often use techniques that come out of the world of fashion art, most notably the technique of “application,” which involves assembling pieces of fabric and fixing them onto the larger garment. In my collages, I employ this technique but do not limit myself to fabric; I also use other kinds of materials, including paper, paint, thread, wire, netting, metal, glass, photographs, jewelry, and found objects.

Blue Face in Two Parts
Medium: Mixed media collage

To me, collage is the form most representative of contemporary experience, to the extent that it captures the way human beings in the 21st century are bombarded with images that our imagination is constantly trying to order and assimilate. I am thus interested in representing objects in a state of flux, objects torn, fragmented, seeming to float away, or hiding partially behind other objects. My collages at the same time represent the attempt to put order into this fleeting material, via a sense of composition and color, as well as through actual objects that metaphorically relate to the art of assembly-netting, lacing, and threading.

St. Anthony’s Temptation
Medium: Mixed media collage

Born in Russia and educated in the Republic of Georgia, Luda Pahl is an artist, dress designer, book illustrator, translator and art teacher living in New York. She received an M.A. degree in Art and Design from the Academy of Art in Tbilisi, Georgia, and attended the Parsons School of Design. She has been awarded a grant for her collages from the Queens Council on the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in New York City, in Huntington, Long Island, and in Monmouth Museum, New Jersey, and her illustrations of prose and poetry have appeared in chapbooks published by New Feral Press.