Our team was inspired to publish a collage created by Alex Ebstein for the inside cover of RANGE Magazine Issue Three after seeing her stunning work on various blogs and inside Vox Gallery in Philly. This piece, “untitled (couples yoga#2),” was created on panel with hand-cut PVC yoga mats.
Ebstein is an artist, curator and writer based in Baltimore, Maryland, and she received her MFA from Towson University in 2015. Her work has recently been included in group exhibitions at Stockholm’s Loyal Gallery, Mixed Greens in NYC and Brooklyn’s Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, as well as in solo exhibitions at SophiaJacob and Goucher College’s Rosenberg Gallery in Baltimore. Ebstein also co-founded and directed Nudashank, an artist-run gallery in downtown Baltimore that presented programming from 2009 to 2013.
Lucky for us, we had the opportunity to speak with Alex Ebstein to learn more about her love of collage and her interest in RANGE Magazine.
Q. What’s so interesting about working with PVC yoga mats?
A. Yoga mats first came into my work in response to having to stop my yoga practice as I was recovering from eye surgery. The desire to be active was so overwhelming, I actually had a dream that I was cutting yoga mats to make a painting, and awoke in the middle of the night to do research on buying wholesale mats. By the next morning, I had a box of five on the way. Using the material to make art is wonderful because it is so tactile. I usually roll out the mats and sit on them, stretch a little and then begin to plan and cut my forms and collage them together. The colors, while there are a number of them, are also a nice limitation. I know I will only use what is available, and then have to be creative in adding other colors, textures or patterns into the work.
Q. Would you say your collages are an interpretation of how you view the world?
I would agree that the material fits my outlook on life: a need to be hands on, comfortable and find my own style of working. It is nice to be a little bit outside of painting, sculpture and the historical pressures of traditional mediums.
Q. What are your favorite subjects to collage?
A. Abstraction, always, but in making my pieces, I am often thinking about the body and its historical role in abstraction such as the navels and mustaches of Jean Arp.
Q. Where do you find inspiration for your work?
A. Everywhere! Art history, nature, the Internet, books, fashion, dreams and beyond. My largest, most recent piece, a diptych that is 6-feet x 8-feet overall, was made while listening to Italo Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon” from Cosmiccomics. I listened to it over and over, obsessed with the completeness of his vision for this absurd history in which the moon was much closer and it’s gravitational pull overlapped with the Earth’s, bending the sea into an arch underneath it, and allowing for people to travel between if they rowed out to sea with a ladder.
I am also inspired by my peers. I live with the talented artist duo Jessie & Katey, who paint murals and make batik paintings, and Seth Adelsberger, who creates paintings and digitally sourced imagery, which is printed on carpet. Also, my studio-mate April Camlin makes meticulous embroidery and weavings.
Q. Do the outdoors, nature and/or active lifestyle influence your artwork?
A. Making art, specifically my work, is such an indoor practice, so I find myself torn between the need and desire to make things, and the need and desire to be outdoors. I think the closer a piece comes to making me forget that I am indoors when it is done, the more successful it is. In fact, I am currently starting a new body of work and am heading to Maine for a few days in nature with my sketchbook before returning to the studio.
Q. Why were you drawn to the idea of contributing to RANGE Magazine?
A. RANGE promotes an active lifestyle, being outdoors and great design, all things I can get behind!
XX SYDNEY