Kristofer Heng

late night collages 2017 – ongoing

a continuing series of collages I make
late at night in the studio, or
after work if I don’t make it to the studio, or
in the in between hours of the day.
Using humor to process emotions,
headlines, anxieties and all the days-goings-on

Time? How do you find it? Who has it nowadays? You wake up, supposedly, and you do many things. You get dressed, you eat food, you prepare your body for the day. Being an artist, you have to wear many hats as they say, and do many jobs. One of the jobs is the artmaking itself but sometimes it’s something you have to find the time for instead of the time being there for it.   

Quick! One Last Poem Before I Go Off, My Rocker…, which I’ve stolen from the beginning of a poem by Frank O’Hara in his collection of Lunch poems, that he wrote on his lunch breaks while working at MoMa, are a continuing series of collages that I make in the “off” hours of the day, or late at night after the day’s obligations are done. They are made quickly with the idea of letting the mind process all the sounds, words, headlines, sightings, anxieties, daydreams, illusions, and confusions of the moment and at the same time trying to play with the underlying structures of how it is we make the world around us in all our descriptions and renderings of it in the mind.

As humans, we declare, exclaim, manifest, and will what we think a thing means into reality. Truth is meaning but meaning is not fact. We want truth because we’ve heard about it and if we’ve heard about it, that means it’s something that’s been framed by language. Therefore, to give truth to meaning is a linguistic act and with the advent of the camera obscura and the equally opaque interface of social media, images too have become quick linguistic events.

Time is money and time is space and time is an ‘is’ to us. I guess in a funny way that this “is-ing” act we do as humans is what the Late Night Collages are all about for me, at least I think so.

 “The real is only the base, but it is the base.”

                                                            -Wallace Stevens