Short Stories

     Collage Boxes by Moira Fain

    
   Co-Curated by Elanah Sherman of Periodic Art

Connecticut artist Moira Fain began her collage box series in 1997. Based on recollections from childhood, these haunting diorama boxes gain their capacity to communicate from their extreme specificity to the artist’s life. "Each piece," Moira notes, "wants to be read."

Moira was motivated to create these pieces by a drive to understand her past. The process of creation was frequently shaped by subconscious direction, with a final understanding of the piece achieved only at its completion. As an artist, Moira is driven "first, by the need to interpret the external world and, second, by the need to interpret and understand the internal world." Each piece collates both realms of experience into constructions of extraordinary resonance.

Deriving their power sometimes through understatement, other times through complex elaboration, each collage delivers an effecting message that communicates itself independently of its narrative details. The viewer is drawn in and absorbed by a mysterious, archetypal familiarity. One need not know Moira’s story to feel each piece telling one’s own. Moira recently moved with her family from a house in Tolland to an artists’ cooperative in Hartford. An artist’s artist, she says she moved to "be with her
people."

Where Babies Come From,
mixed media collage box.

King of the Hill,
mixed media collage box.

Tickets Please,
mixed media collage box.

                                  December 10, 2000 - January 14, 2001