Art by Geoffrey Gatza
Mixed Media Collage, Collage, Poetry, Poetry Collage
My collage work is an exploration of texture, language, and the interplay between material and meaning. Using watercolor-painted paper, cut and arranged on matte boards, I create layered compositions that evoke movement, memory, and emotion. Each piece is an act of both deconstruction and reconstruction—tearing apart and reassembling fragments to form something new.
Poetry is at the heart of my process. Through careful placement of lettering and text within my collages, I seek to merge the visual and the verbal, allowing words to become as much a part of the composition as color and shape. These works exist in the space between the written and the seen, engaging with the rhythm of poetry while embracing the tactile, handmade quality of collage.
Inspired by the physicality of paper, the fluidity of watercolor, and the infinite possibilities of arrangement, my work invites viewers to engage with the tension between chaos and structure, abstraction and narrative. Whether through a single composition or a sequence of images, I aim to create a dialogue between elements—an intuitive conversation between color, form, and the poetic impulse.
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Geoffrey Gatza is the author of the poetry collections The House of Forgetting (2012), Apollo: A Conceptual Poem (2014), and A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees (2018).
Divya Victor, in an article for poetryfoundation.org, said of Apollo: A Conceptual Poem “The diversity of these works echoes the complexities of the subject, but together they posit something specific, the heightened relationship between the interior self and the exterior world.”
Gatza’s poems have been published in anthologies, as well as magazines and journals including Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, The Pickled Body, Peach Mag, Tupelo Quarterly and various others. His play on Marcel Duchamp was staged in an art installation in Philadelphia and performed in NYC.
Gatza is an award-winning editor, publisher and poet. He is the driving force behind BlazeVOX, an independent press located in Buffalo, NY, specializing in innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Geoffrey Gatza is lives in Kenmore, NY.
editor@blazevox.org
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