Biography
Blake Collins is a Los Angeles based visual artist. The breadth of his discipline incorporates a variety of media including painting, photography, drawing, writing, film and audio. Since 2008, his focus has been analogue paper collage, which Collins terms “paper assemblages.”
As a child, Collins grew as an artist while enrolled in several different art classes, including those at Mission Renaissance, MonArt, Brentwood Art Center and in the context of private boutique instruction. In his teen years, he attended Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences from 1997 to 2002, where he studied photography and drawing.
While still a student at Crossroads, Collins participated in the month-long California State Summer School for Art (CSSSA) program at CalArts, in 2001, with a focus on photography and painting. He later applied to CalArts as an undergraduate; the school accepted Collins’ application for enrollment directly from high school.
After graduating from Crossroads in 2002, Collins began life as a Studio Art and Art History major at UCLA, where he studied with artists Jennifer Bolande, Hirsch Perlman, Patty Wickman, Bart Exposito, Thadius Strode, James Welling and Don Suggs, among others, with a focus on painting.
In his post-academic work, Collins focuses exclusively on paper collage. As one deeply interested in consciousness and dreams — thus resonating deeply with surrealism — Collins' work dives headfirst into the abstraction of images and their linguistic counterparts and revels in the whimsical relation between the sign, the signifier and the signified.
Collins has also participated in several exhibitions, including group shows at Marine Contemporary, the L.A. Art Show, Scope Art Show, Art Basel Miami, and Art Hamptons. He often produces his work on a commission basis.
Artist Statement
"I believe in the dormant potential of found media to acquire new meaning when placed in juxtaposition with other found media. Relationships between images and our linguistic categorization of them evolve in the process, shifting our conception of established perceptual realities by infusing them with a new gestalt vocabulary.”