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?

Technology has brought about a profound transformation in the realm of art, reshaping both the process of creation for artists and the experience of consumption for viewers. We no longer view most art in person, but on our devices. With the advent of digital tools and platforms, artists now have a vast array of resources at their disposal, enabling them to experiment, collaborate, and distribute work with unprecedented ease—One reason we founded Juniper Rag.

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.