Apr 12, 2016 >> Getting Handsy with James Ewert [VIDEO]
Our Spring Fashion Issue got some extra love with the help of collage artist James Ewert. To bring semblance to our Josephine Baker-inspired shoot, James used his craft to bring the atmosphere of a modern Bronze Venus to life. James’ intricate process of bibliographic foraging, dissection and sticky imposition gives us a whole new appreciation to the art of photomontage.
James’ tagline goes a little something like this: “I make collages all F-ing day.” His unfiltered and unapologetic personality directly manifests through his work. Many of his pieces bring seemingly irrelevant elements together into an entertaining juxtaposition: think grandma’s quilt turned psychedelic icon or intergalactic gemstones.
SEE BEHIND THE SCENES OF JAMES’ WORK >>
“Whether it’s juxtaposing a cut-out from a porn magazine on a photo of the Lincoln Memorial, or I just spontaneously slap a single boring cutout with a beautiful, complex picture, neither of which I had a hand in actually creating,” explains James “And all I did was really bring the two together, I think the humor of that is the seemingly lazy oversimplification of what constitutes what a collage, or art, really is.”
James’ process is analog. He most often sources images from used books and magazines then precisely extracts images with an exacto knife. Without using any digital editing, he runs images through a sticker machine to create the perfect adhesion for assembling. And what’s so cool about James’ pieces are you can’t really tell if it’s digital or handcrafted, but tangibly in person you can feel the layers of paper and begin to deconstruct how it was put together.
Explore James’ work on his website BuyEwert.com, and if you purchase one collage he’ll throw in a free surprise collage to go with it. And see some of James’ work in action in our Starlette! feature.