"I'm going to be a famous painter someday and you'll probably end up teaching at some girl's school."
photomontage

From Eva Lake:
"Before I ever montaged, I collected old magazines and nostalgia.

As it was the images I loved most, I had no problem cutting them up to create a different story.I started right around the time of punk in the late 70s and was influenced by that movement as much as the Dadaists John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch and the Pop artist Richard Hamilton.

Over the years I've made all kinds of art but I keep coming back to photomontage. I've called it a Bedroom Art as often that was all I had. You can make it out of a suitcase. I was never one to just slap things together though and sometimes images traveled around with me for years before I used them.
 
In 2002 I had a Collage Show at the White Gallery at PSU. As I went through my inventory I saw what a constant art it had always been.
 
Sometimes there were big holes in my life, where it looks like I just dropped into an abyss of the Working Woman of New York City. But the work was still being made; it just didn't get shown. The collection spans four decades.
 
 9/11 was oddly a time of regeneration for me. Terrible as that sounds, I know I was not the only artist to feel suddenly not alone in their paranoias. 
 
I returned to previous themes and works I had made years ago had a renewed meaning.  
 
As it turns out, many artists montage, though they might not take it all that seriously. I often meet artists who got their start in the fanzine and the collages they made for it.
 
Those fanzine days may be behind them and now they are on to hot galleries and the like, but they still make the occasional collage. I am hoping to sometime curate a show of some of these artists.  

I have posted more photomontages in my Art Diary."