Those Inner Workings

RANDY MORA ALLOWS US TO PICK HIS BRAIN for a little bit, shedding some light on his otherwise obscure work. Exhibiting a clear and consistent point of view, his compositions are both beautiful and strange.

Thank you Randy for taking the time to be here!

When did you make your first collage? And what was it of?
I remember back in 2007 I used to work with some friends in a small studio located in an old house downtown city. At the time, within several failed experiments, I was trying to find a visual way of expressing myself. I was studying advertising, therefore I didn't have any technical skill to draw or paint. One day by accident I discovered a box in the basement with a bunch of old magazines that were going to be thrown away. It seemed to me a waste to leave it there, so I decided to take the box to my studio. In that stack of magazines, I found the opportunity to create something new. The first attempt, which could be considered my first Collage, was the unfortunate result of a mix between a badly painted background and a bunch of rough clippings that shaped the face of a clown. I guess I already lost that Collage, but I still remember it with nostalgia. In 2008 I found in the computer the possibility of giving more control to what I was doing manually, that's how I ended up working with digital Collage. Recently I'm doing some tests to return to the handmade technique again.

You tend to have a lot of dismembered body parts and innards in your collages. What is your intent or inspiration behind this?
I've always been attracted to the relationship between the flesh, the sin and hedonistic lifestyle. Although some people perceive my work in a surrealist aesthetic, I prefer to see it as my most honest attempt to represent the essence of human nature. It is more an exercise of recontextualization. By analyzing the feeling of innocence and nostalgia inherent of the retro imagery, I've found an interesting resource to create an amalgam between this and the unnerving feeling produced by the anatomy imagery; thereby I've had the opportunity to generate the dark atmosphere that characterizes my work.

Art by Randy Mora, www.randymora.com