Contemporary collage artists are far from a monolith. Blending the eclectic realism of found source material—images from magazine spreads to scientific illustrations—with fantastical arrangement and a critical eye, these artists create worlds of symbolic mystique. Each of the following artists engages with the medium in a unique and intensely personalized way, tantalizing me with clues to this mystery: just why is collage so captivating?

“I seek to spark an innate sense of curiosity and possibility. By harmonizing emerging digital capabilities with timeless values underpinning humanity’s appreciation of nature, I want my artwork to compassionately further dialogue on our shared ecological future – one where human creativity might thrive in unison with technology and our planet. Though anchored in tradition, I fuse the old and new, the natural and digital, in hopes of revealing our world anew.” —Colleen Hoffenbacker

Our world as we know it has been changing at an exponential rate since the beginning stages of the. First we could read information from the web, then we could interact with it, and then we could add to the dialogue by interacting personally with the web and the world at large. Creatively, the scope of our reality has shifted as well.