Tiny Boyfriends: Richard Baldasty

Artist's Statement:

Collage is a trickster generating wayward juxtapositions. It scuffles with realism, challenges and expands it. As in prose poetry, which sometimes creates new worlds from shards of our actual one (notably, Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End, a frequent inspiration), collage delights in surprise, asks that one give welcome to the unexpected, allowing it to become, if briefly, a dazzling recruit to the ordinary life brigade. Against the sudden ubiquity of AI, too facile at surrealism, traditional cut-and-paste collage, now designated analog, reasserts human sovereignty over serendipity. 

Richard Baldasty is a collagist and poet who lives in Spokane, Washington. Instagram: @rbaldasty