Peterburg Collage

Born USA 1944. Indie film director and collage artist, currently based in New York. For the past 40 years I have constructed collages and shadow boxes for private collectors. My work centers around the theme of cultural identity. Much of my life has been spent outside the United States (French Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East) in places where I needed to acquire a new language, learn a new alphabet and adhere to the subtleties of different social customs. These are places with their own cultural narratives, simultaneously rejecting and welcoming American influences, absorbing and transforming them to fit a new cultural space.It seems a natural consequence of this global mix that I work in a collage format, appropriating the language, signs and icons of other cultures, regardless of the medium. I attempt to reduce a subject to a few evocative images, treating image as icon.