Statement:

My work is rooted in media image proliferation and collage. However, my collages work outside of the picture plane. I adjust the scale of the image and let pieces of the images hang off the wall, referencing the uncontrollable and often unruly nature of media images. Choosing photographs that display a specific organizational structure, such as packaging, emphasizes my need to physically control an uncontrollable amount of media information. The interdisciplinary nature of my work grows out of disorientation and deception: disorientation around what the original image is and deception by turning the image into an abstracted deconstructed version of itself.

My studio process involves collecting images, re-photographing or documenting media images with my portable phone camera, digitally resizing them, and then professionally printing them for the sole purpose of physically cutting them apart to collapse their original intended meaning. The process of taking an image that conveys organization, and then deliberately disorganizing it, addresses the deception around image proliferation in media: you never know what you are really looking at or where it originally came from. I use the photograph as a tool; that is to say, I play with the space between an images manipulation and its believability. 

Bio:

b. 1970 Erie PA

Currently lives and works in Denver CO

Susan Hopp recently earned her MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art and Design. Previously she obtained a BFA in Painting from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and an MA in Sculpture from West Virginia University. Hopp exhibits nationally and was awarded a scholarship to attend a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson Vermont.

Her work is interdisciplinary and uses appropriated images, drawing, and collage to investigate the relationship between digital media and the hand-made.  The nature of her work grows out of disorientation and deception: disorientation around what the original image is and deception by turning the image into an abstracted deconstructed version of itself.

Hopp currently teaches advanced drawing at Metro State University of Denver as well as foundations studies at The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Lakewood Colorado.

She has been a member Artnauts since 2016