Draft:Ordinary Day (Lorna Bieber)

Contents

Origin:

• Lorna Bieber
• Evolution of Bieber’s Art

Ordinary Day:

• Overview
• Materials
• Process

Deeper Meaning in Bieber’s Collages:

• Immersion in Parallel World of Collective Consciousness
• Spirituality and Art

Origin

Lorna Bieber:

Lorna Bieber knew she wanted to be an artist from a young age— just three or four. Her friends and family supported her dream, and she majored in art in college. She began working as an artist soon after. In her early days of work, she was paralyzed by indecision and the blank page, indecisive about all the variation she could introduce to her art. During a stint working at the magazine Newsweek, Bieber began using recycled and leftover photos and altering them. She enjoyed taking images of the real world and changing them in different ways, allowing her interest in variation to be realized.

Evolution of Bieber’s Art

Bieber’s found artwork began by taking leftover images from her job at Newsweek magazine and altering them either via drawing on them or introducing changes in the xerox machine. Bieber dropped off her portfolio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photography department, who put her in contact with Chuck Kelton who worked with her for the next thirty years. Kelton only printed in black and white, so Bieber only worked in black and white for the next fifteen years. Bieber was always interested in her work being printed bigger— at the time her work grew to about the size of a doorway. While the overall piece grew in size, she began to create montages, which included several smaller altered found images in a grid setting with each photo framed by white boarder. These montages took one to two and a half years each with each of the images meticulously placed in exactly the location she liked it at. The next breakthrough in Bieber’s career came when she decided to remove the white boarders around each photo and remove the grid structure. Then, Bieber began working in color and taking her own photos via an iPhone camera. This resulted in her most recent pieces Ordinary Day (2016-2019) and Quiet Night (2019-2022).

Ordinary Day

Overview

The form of the work is a collage of simple images taken with Bieber’s iPhone, digitally or otherwise edited. The images consist of everyday images, such as houses, greenery, and flowers. The viewer’s eye roams over the work with no discernible beginning or end. Bieber is less interested in representing the world as it is in reality as she is in exploring images that reside in our collective consciousness.

Materials

The images are xeroxes that are arranged using push pins and poster putty so the images are easily movable. When the final work is completed, it is photographed and then printed on canvas.

Process

The process of creating Ordinary Day was a long one. Starting in 2016 and completing the work in 2019, the process begins by Bieber taking hundreds of photos with her iPhone camera. Then, she edits and manipulates the imagery, and selects a final hundred or so that are xeroxed and arranged with push pins and poster putty on her studio wall. The pins and putty allow Bieber to move the photos around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, constantly making changes to the overall montage. She rearranges the images in thousands of permutations until they are in a pattern in which any one photo does not pull Bieber’s attention. This is when she deems the work complete.

Deeper Meaning

Immersion in Parallel World of Collective Consciousness

Bieber is satisfied when a viewer comments that they know they have never been to the images in her works, but feel as though they have. She enjoys using images of places that do not truly exist due to her edits but seem to immerse the viewer in a parallel world of memory, dreams and nostalgia. The monumentality of her work encourages the reader to imagine what it would be like to step out of their reality and into the world of their subconscious. Collages are often used to express and construct the artists story by communication without having to find the correct words. However, Bieber’s collages exploit the commonalities of man in order to connect people both to other people and to their own inner sense of wonder and creativity in a pictorial manner rather than through words. The familiar feeling of the work feels as though one could step through the canvas into parallel world in which we are all familiar with in the depths of our consciousness.

Spirituality in Art

Bieber’s art is intended to immerse the viewer in the world she creates and reconnect the viewer with their sense of wonder. Her purpose in making the art is to evoke emotion and encourage the viewer to search for spirituality. She aims to connect the viewer to the unseen forces that lie beneath the material world and create a world in her art that the viewer can be immersed in and feel these forces that are much larger and greater than the viewer, and yet the viewer does not feel diminished.