We May Be Through With The Past, But The Past Ain't Through With Us Collage

There are times in your life when you are given an opportunity to reinvent yourself. To change direction. To start fresh. You take on new interests and incorporate them into your being while discarding other aspects that no longer fit your vision. But there are some things that cannot be discarded. They are too engrained. Permanently etched into your being. They are integral to your identity and no matter how much you try to change them the new arrangement still ends up looking familiar. A zebra can’t change his stripes. While we associate these transformations with major life events, they are actually happening every day. New experiences, new people, new moments, big and small are constantly changing us. Old memories and interests fade. One by one we add and subtract from ourselves. But in the end, even after many years, you can still recognize yourself in the mirror. The more we change the more some things stay the same. Working within collage, Thom's work explores these issues of identity, the hidden layers of influence and the numerous ways in which we remake ourselves day by day. In this new work, portraits have been shredded and reassembled to create a new vision of the person. Multiple images of the same individual have been used in the new composite to mimic this new reinvention of the self. In addition, other images have been incorporated to reflect the external influences of other people, our culture and the media that affect each of us. Note: The collage has been framed and encased in encaustic.