Julie Lapping Rivera

Pandora’s Box
collage with woodcut

This work is part of a collage series exploring ideas about human relationships, emerging feminine identity, and the act of making art. I begin by constructing a kind of stage which is based on an abstracted interior space, which serves as a metaphor for the inner world. I introduce props and then figures, who participate in an implied narrative. Multicolor woodblock prints, painted papers, and found printed matter, including digitally printed images from the history of art, make up my materials.

References to art history are built into the work as a way to both honor and recontextualize varied modes of pictorial representation. The formal, abstract qualities and relationships within the pieces are very much a part of the expressive language.

© Julie Lapping Rivera