Ian Andrews

Caprice Lulu America is a series of collages, or text-image assemblages, that form an investigation into the materiality of language—a kind of conceptual concrete poetry.

Each page was assembled from a collection of found material, where the words and images are selected at random. As soon as an element is selected by chance it is immediately pasted down on the page, beginning at the top. There is no attempt to construct an overall layout or design. However, each element is aligned with the others, according to decisions made in terms of association, and how the eye is lead between the elements, but these decisions are made on the fly and without revision.

Through the interplay of headline(s) with other textual and visual elements, these collages aim to enstrange the ideological workings between text and image, and disrupt the process that would make innocent the supposedly denotative text. The incommensurability where the text (word + image) works at the limits of meaning, severs to foreground the systems of connotation that constitute the construction of meaning according to a certain syntax.