Description:

Rachel Leibman is a collage artist from Montclair, NJ. She uses small pieces of paper as her palette and "paints" colorful, detailed and often elaborate pictures. The collages are coated with many layers of buffed varnish so that the colors are vivid and the pieces take on the appearance of inlaid ceramic tiles. They are called "illuminations" and are composed from copies of ancient manuscripts of different religions, languages and styles. The imagery within the collages is also cross-cultural, depicting items such as hybrid creatures, planetary objects and elaborate intersecting lines that are typical symbols for almost every religion. For her, this cultural amalgamation represents a characteristically modern and American view – the freedom to embrace the meaningful and reject the stifling, despite of the randomness of birth.