Do you make the collage or does the collage make you?

Last Sunday, my roomies and I attended a Pizza and Visionary Collage-Making party at the local artists’ collective (have I mentioned how happy I am to be back in San Francisco?). It was just your run-of-the-mill visionary collage party – magazines, scissors, glue sticks, and hope. Really, it was awesome – a couple dozen people hunched over on the floor cutting and pasting their goals and aspirations for 2009.

I flipped through magazines from Times to Vanity Fair to Maxim to National Geographic and cut out all kinds of words and images. One of my favorites was a clip that said “Love Life” and as I set it next to my collage to start gluing, I knocked over my can of Tecate. It soaked through my jeans but thankfully missed most of my magazine cut-outs, all except for my Love Life, which was ruined by the beer. Typical.

Molly had found a great clip in San Francisco magazine that said “Brilliant Career,” an appropriate aspiration as she’s been tempting for the last couple months and is trying to figure out what kind of job she wants longterm. But she also found lots of other great images and words. As she positioned and glued, she kept pushing her “Brilliant Career” off to the right, until she realized there was no room for it left on the collage.

I don't know if you believe in the power of a visionary collage, but I think those too occurrences were just a little too real to be coincidences.