Lorette Luzajic

This collage/mixed media piece of work is made by Lorette Luzajic, an artist and writer from Canada. She studied Journalism at Ryerson university but is also a self taught artist, specialising in mixed media and photography. The majority of her work is based on strong topics such as human rights, culture, religion, addiction and grief, that work along side her career as a journalist. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and spends all her time working on her visual creativity. The name of this piece of work is unknown but was most likely made to be exhibited or as a book illustration. I have chosen to analyse this piece as I want my final zine to be mixed media based and I found her work very inspiring for this as she has used a mixture of text and images.

The theme of this piece of work seems to be ancient religion for different cultures as the images show objects from the past, symbolism and old bits of writing on paper etc. For example the sarcophagus represents ancient Egypt and the Russian rubble's represents Russian currency. The deeper you look into the collage the more things you find out about as there is so much imagery, such as a ticket, money, symbols and statues to look at. However to fully understand this piece you would need to have a lot of knowledge about religion, culture and history.

She has used lots of different photographs and bits of paper to build up this collage, by cutting the pictures up and layering them on top of each other to fill the page. The colours used in the collage help to put across the theme as they are all very dull and limited. She has also made the photographs and bits of paper go brown to help make them look old.

When I first saw this piece I felt the colours and images drew me in as they looked interesting and I wanted to know what it was about. After looking at it in more detail I could see that it had a lot of culture and religious symbolism within it but the colours used suggested it was to do with the past. However I was still unsure of what it was actually about so I had to do some research into what some of the symbols were and also asked other people on their opinion. I think this really helps the work as it draws people in to look at in-depth. I like the work because of this and the fact that she uses text as the background layer and then builds up on this with images. I also like that it is very clear that it has a strong story about as it holds the viewers attention. I wouldnt say there is much I dislike about this collage as it is so strong but an improvement could be adding in some texture, such as stitching or different materials to do with the theme. This work inspires me as I feel it is very similar to what I am trying to make for my final outcome. So far the main similarity is the text in the background that she has stained brown as I have used the same technique for my page backgrounds to make it look old. However I feel the image below inspires me more:

This is because she has used a lot more different materials to create this mixed media collage, such as fabric, ripped up paper, cut out images and acrylic paints. I would like to merge the two ideas together to create something with more texture and layers but to draw the user in with a strong theme.