"Urban Planning" Collage

(b. 1997, Denver, CO) Jake Fifer graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2019 with a bachelor's degree in Design in Architecture, and a Minor in Art. Although he studied Architecture, he always had a stronger interest in visual art and design as a whole. From a very young age, Jake enjoyed creating staged scenes for photos that often had a dreamlike quality. This expanded into a love for escapism and surrealism, manifesting in the forms of mixed media experiments involving photography, set design, and digital manipulation, to create disorienting photorealistic final compositions. Jake’s affinity for digitally assisted surrealism continued to develop in college projects, leading to his first formal digital editing class. Here he experimented with the collage format, combining education about aesthetics over time with digital manipulation, while maintaining a consistent theme of disorientation or altered reality. This quickly evolved into a large collection of over 100 unique, vintage, surreal, collage compositions. In these experimentations, Jake found ways to intertwine themes of climate change, mental health, and nostalgia by carefully selecting elements with strong connections to these themes and re-contextualizing them for a new composition. Jake has been invited to participate in nine juried art fairs across Minnesota in the past two years, with hopes of continuing to share his works with a wider audience in the future.