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Rita Valley A Brief Introduction to My Work I make things. This enables me to order the universe; to feel good or sane, and occasionally, both. If I become geopolitically exasperated, or emotionally bereft or simply giddy with the temporary sensation of having inhaled too much reality for my own good, I make some "art" and feel a whole lot better. This is an almost daily ritual. I often work in protracted series, as this gives me the form/structure to explore repeatedly, without having to reinvent the wheel whenever I enter my studio. A single idea is often the jumping off point for variations and inversions and fulgent tangents. I often work on standard sizes of readily available materials. Sometimes, I derive comfort in knowing that simple decisions have been made for me. If a piece of paper comes in a dimension that is prefab-pleasing, why change it? This is just another kind of choice, a kind of anti-choice that frees the more interesting and subcutaneous parts of my sensibility. I don't know exactly how to define the parts of me that are compelled to create art. The concept of' "personal expression" in art seems to have developed a bad reputation of late and I think that's a great pity To me, a singular point of view is an amazing thing to cultivate and offer up I can't think that every artist will ever speak to everyone, nor that that sort of universality would be desirable even if it were attainable. I more or less hope to touch a nerve among a core of sympathetic individuals To illustrate, my most recent cycle of collages began as an attempt to keep myself busy while experiencing an illness, and simultaneously quit smoking. My concentration was shot to hell and I was unable to paint. I had in my possession a strange assortment of news and fashion magazines culled from a recycling bin at a local library. I sat for hours in a logy stupor, flipping pages, not actively creating a single thing. But on a deeper level, I was hard at work. Mysteriously, my self- pitying torpor evolved into a strange at-home, cold-turkey crash-course in cultural catch-up, as I remarked upon the parallel universes of austerity and surfeit, corruption and cleavage, torsos and tommyboys and politicos. I erupted into a mad campaign of collage. I carved up ads and endorsements and typeface and propaganda and diatribe and fashioned them into a quasi-abstract synthesis of twisted reality. Whose reality? Mine in part. But society at large gets to share some of the credit and blame.
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