Maker’s Medium: Piecing together new meanings from existing works with collage
Second-year arts student Elliot Couts dabbles in a variety of mediums, but for their zine "Goodnight Gen Z," they utilized colorful, dadist-inspired collages. The zine was made as a part of Marcos Rios's class, Beginning New Genres (Art 11D). Couts' work brings together poetry, LGBTQ+ topics, and video games. Their collages were featured as a part of the Daily Bruin column "Maker's Medium."
"The personal overlays the political in Elliott Couts’ collage work.
A product of cubism, collage is a scrambling or rearranging of existing work, and Couts said their zine “Goodnight Gen Z” grew from the style and is meant to be interpretive. (Courtesy of Elliott Couts) Couts said they have been making art for as long as they can remember, from using bamboo in their family’s garden as a medium to dabbling in watercolor and acrylic at the arts high school they attended. As a second-year art student, Couts said they currently work in a variety of mediums; they used collage to create the zine titled “Goodnight Gen Z” for their beginning new genres class.
“(The zine is) me dabbling into topics I’m interested in (and) things I think are important to discuss,” Couts said. “There’s something attractive about taking … what the media has given you and twisting it to show some other truth or some other message.”
Short for magazine, a zine is a small, self-published work of images and text that are original, appropriated or – in Couts’ case – both. The format naturally gives way to collage, in which Couts said there is a freedom to compile and distribute artistic material at one’s will. Collage is a product of cubism and was pioneered by either Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque in 1912, though Juan Gris was the first to exhibit a work in the medium.
New genres professor Marco Rios said he grew up attending punk shows and often saw people distributing the zines they produced. Rios teaches collage through a dadaist-inspired project in which students cut out, scramble and rearrange words from a newspaper into a screenplay. The title of the zine Couts made for the course’s final, “Goodnight Gen Z,” does not have one defined meaning and is meant to be interpretive, Couts said."— David Egan, Feb. 5 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
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