jane sloss, watercolor paintings: Featured Artist

Friday, November 12, 2010

Featured Artist

Sabina Nieto
In the second installment of the featured artist series, I would like to introduce Sabina Nieto. Sabina is a California native, trained as an architect-builder and is infinitely amazed by the hand-made, regardless of scale. Pulling the strings of technical presentation by day, in her off hours she co-curates a modest gallery in Berkeley, and is a freelance designer in range of media. You can find her building at the dinner table, most any day.

Please feel free to get in touch with Ms. Nieto.

“Baptistry,” collage, 8” x 11”, Sabina Nieto, 2010

What inspires you about collage as a medium? Where do you search for and typically find the images used in your collages? Collage-making and image juxtaposition has long been one of my immediate ways of visualizing an idea, if not a fluid medium of playing with place-making. I borrow images from what are mostly found and second-hand books and posters. I’m drawn to quickly-aged source materials (bearing the marks of weather when found curbside, or belonging to a particular time when featuring culture)—revealing their age through tell-tale costumes, antiquated equipment, or the yellowing of paper.
I’ve always loved collage as well as assemblage, collections, altars, quilts—a bit of visual potluck. From many moments of refuse, a whole personal map can be divined. I never doubt the place from which these kinds of things are made.

“Observatory,” collage, 11” x 11.5”, Sabina Nieto, 2010

You seem to create spaces in many of your collages, what interests you about compiling an occupiable environment through found images?

I often drop representations of people into my collages, creating “occupiable environments”, perhaps part of a residual architectural convention insisting people be considered when designing as well as, very functionally, providing scale. These places become personal. Otherwise ambiguous destinations for the wandering eye are provided windows, walls, vanishing points, or horizons to register where you are. If we’re lucky these spaces become richer by becoming more specific—equipped with hiding places, beach blankets, a make-shift armchair . . . one could ask, “May I make myself at home?”