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

http://www.blazevox.org

What began as meditations on the fence as a form, bisecting nature, became an instigator of narrative—a catalyst of change.
Personally, the concept of a chain-link fence is tied deeply into my past-lived experience as one of the first goals I accomplished.
As a child who lived with chain link surrounding his house and the orange groves around that, I saw fencing as something which showed me what I could achieve
by overcoming it. Being able to climb chainlink meant access to the fields, and those orange groves and dirt roads in Perris, California.
From that point onward, fences began to take on a different meaning, from achievements to delineations of space, warnings, privacy, separations between self
and other.
Fences began to be seen as violent ‘things,’ as reckonings, as exploit, as a place to piss.
The fences in these paintings take me back to a romantic nostalgia; the linking metal as script, as flowered beams of light.
The fences obstruct.
The fences abstract.
The fences hide.
Each scene is charged by its fence.
Each Fence is a slicing of imagery.
This fence and that fence a poignant symbol—each evidence of human existence, of human politic, of human territory, and human border.
Each fence communicates potential to figures at every side.

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Michael Haight (b. 1984, Fontana, CA) was raised in the Inland Empire of Southern California, and now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of California at Riverside, CA and an MFA in Visual Art from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. The Artist has shown in spaces throughout the US and Europe including Solo Exhibitions at My Pet Ram in New York, NY(2023); One Trick Pony in Los Angeles, Ca (2022) and Group Exhibitions at Good Naked, Los Angeles, Ca (2024), La Beast Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Phillips Auction House in London, UK (2022); G/Art/En Gallery in Como, Italy (2022); One Trick Pony Gallery in Los Angeles, CA(2024); Lyles and King in New York, NY(2021); UTA Artist Space in Beverly Hills, CA (2021); OCCCA in Santa Ana, CA (2021); LACE in Hollywood, CA (2011) and Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, CA (2011-2012). His curatorial projects include Group-a-Therapists at Kippenberger-Beuys Gallery in Glendale, CA (2016), and Being Present Mafia at Soze Gallery in West Hollywood, CA (2016). His work has been featured in the publications Hyperallergic (2023), KCRW (2023), Architectural Digest (2022), New American Paintings (2021-2023), Art Maze (2021) and the collaborative book, with the Poet Cutter Streeby, entitled Tension: Rupture (Tupelo Press 2021).