I rolled over in bed this morning and grabbed my phone to look at Instagram. I'm not that enthusiastic about Instagram, but scrolling in the morning is one way for me to trick myself into waking up. (I did that thing yesterday where I worked too hard and too long, so I rebelled and reasserted my own control and freedom by staying up until one AM playing Animal Crossing.) The first post I saw was by Alice Stone Collins, and I thought I can blog about her this morning.
She's artist based in the Atlanta Metro Area who uses bright opaque water colors and cuts out her images before overlaying them to form collages. Her stuff is amazing. It's suburban surrealism. Bubblegum optimistic and vaguely threatening. It's got me thinking about how the suburbs are a kind of liminal space. (Liminal is a word I learned in the last couple of months and since then have seen everywhere. Meaning a boundary, a threshold, a space between spaces. Either I've just been noticing it more because I now know what it means or it's one of those words du jour that everyone's already getting sick of.) Collins takes advantage of this Suburban eeriness, of the settings that are supposed to be aspirational - outside the city but not really rural - the repetition of house, house, house... life, life, life. Not quite visible but not wholly obscured.
As someone who's chosen to live in an apartment in a city, I'm biased. But this morning, the suburbs feel a little bit like death, spreading a flimsy blackened film over the living.
Anyway, here are a few of my favorite works by Alice Stone Collins:
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