growing through the cracks Collage

My headphones they saved my life... Living in New York for more than 4 years, studying art and design, I used to walk its streets armored with my headphones, my music muting all surrounding sounds, creating an alternative reality within reality. Controlling the city's senses- overload, I became a by-stander, an observer; my ears were used as filters for my eyes. In New York you need to define yourself repeatedly, constantly bombard with loads of visuals and sounds, encountering countless characters, enormity of data that pass through you. I felt like a flexible vessel, where everything around me was transforming me into a new adjusted shape. Museums and galleries became my sanctuaries, art and making art became my religion- a place where I feel everything is calming down, as if getting inside myself, grasping an inner tranquility, escaping. I am always in search for escape places, a behind the scene experience- to see but not to be seen. Making art creates these places for me. While creating, I'm absorbed in it, and everyday life and reality as shared by all, falls to the background. My art is made of materials that I find around, "˜visual leftover'; sometimes, images which while flipping through magazines intrigue me - an outer image that somehow matches a fragment of a thought that has been floating in my mind, then the image is incorporated into a scene I construct - mostly it feels like building up a puzzle. David Lynch once referred to making a movie in an interview he has given: "For me, a film exists somewhere before you do it. It's sitting in some abstract world, complete, and you're just listening to it talk to you, telling you the way it's supposed to be. But not until all the sound and music and editing has been done do you truly know what it is. Then it's finished. It feels right, the way it's supposed to be, or as right as it can. And when it's finished, you're back in a world where you don't control anything. You just do the best you can, then say farewell." (Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997"¨Lost Highway - Lynch Interview) There is some mystery to this approach that interests me. Cutting out images from their original intended content, and then incorporating them in my built up space it's an act of reconstruction, matching them up to a new reality, over the one that is offered to me outside. -"˜My headphones they saved my life'-a song by Bjork from Post-