Madame X Collage

After graduating magna cum laude from Philadelphia’s Drexel University with a degree in Photography, L.A. based artist Natalie Obermaier moved to Seattle where she worked alongside acclaimed photographer, Jock Sturges. Working in the darkroom five days a week for three years, she mastered the craft of traditional printing, while also managing his studio. Her early bodies of work in black and white film are soulful and classic, showing a natural and deep connection with the people she photographs. Currently Obermaier has turned her attention to hand-cut collage, sourcing her materials primarily from the glossy pages of women’s fashion magazines. Coalescing is a series of collages made in response to the incessant onslaught of mass media and pressures of mainstream beauty standards found within. Women’s fashion magazines in particular stand at a crossroads of cult, consumerism and the unattainable image. By re-appropriating and deconstructing those glossy pages something truer, hand-made and authentic can be expressed. The resulting juxtapositions seek to remind one of the visual and psychological manipulations abound in advertising while also creating a new dialogue in response. Coalescing manipulates the manipulated as both rebuttal to the aesthetic pressures of advertising and as reclamation of the human image to speak a deeper truth by reflecting a more personable and representative spirit of self. As a self described photographer, I have spent the last few years longing for analog and darkroom more and more. I find myself continually exhausted by the reproducibility of the medium, malaised of the increasing sameness of the tropes within, and craving uniqueness in all forms. Blending craft with photography has been the only way to bring back the artists hand and make something that is mine alone. It has also opened up the world of other artistic mediums to me, helping to shed the burden of the rigid rules within photography.