(acoustic guitar music) - [Voiceover] Amber Fletschock
is a collage artist, working from the rugged
forests of Central Minnesota. Inspired by the nature
surrounding her, Amber's work is a response to the chaos
and abundance of modern times. (ethereal vocal music) - [Amber] I always think
of my collage work as, a little pause in the chaos. (ethereal music) Most people, when they
initially see my pieces, think that they are some
kind of digital print, until they get close
up then they realize that they are collage. - One thing that her work
does really well is that she's able to present
all these pieces of paper that you're familiar
with on a daily basis but when she puts them
together in these maelstroms and these collages,
you're able to enter and continually explore
this other universe. (quiet indie music) - I've been pretty much
making art my whole life probably by the time I was five, I knew that that's what I
wanted to do with my life because my mom was a school
teacher, and an artist at heart and we were taught to use
our imagination, and to make. When I'm starting a piece,
I find one piece that I know I want to
start the piece with, and then I start going
through all my files, and start building off of that, I look for the parts that
speak to me at that moment, going through stacks
and stacks of magazines it's just a constant building
and sometimes a destroying and starting all over again,
it's all very very fluid and it seems
intuitive in a sense, because it has become so
much a part of my craft, and I'm always
learning, along the way, and I have worked on
a lot of small pieces, so that I could learn
my design, and my style, and my composition and
what I gravitate towards. When I was in college I was
in a life-drawing class, and I remember specifically
having a hard time rendering a hand, so I took
a piece from another drawing and tacked it right on
top, and I was instantly amazed by the distortion and
the tension that it created, later on I decided to
completely go over to collage, and use paper as my main medium. People are always
giving me magazines when they find out
what I do for a living, I value that these things
could have a second life when I'm creating I'm also
thinking about the people who have put in a lot
of energy and work, into making this thing
that is temporary, that becomes part
of the piece too, it's almost like a
collaborative work, in a sense. I'm drawn to things that look
like they come from nature, fashion magazines
are usually the best because there's a lot of folds,
and a lot of pattern-work and my new favorite thing is
food and cooking magazines because there's a liquid
quality, a fluidity, and there's little
charred parts, and great color, I'm
really drawn to that. (upbeat acoustic music) I'm fortunate to have
two dogs that get me out every single day, so I get
to see all the subtleties of the seasons changing,
and the drastic changes too, and they definitely help
in that process of creating my work is very reflective
of that, in the shapes that are found in
nature, certain times
are very very lush, and then there's times in
which things are decomposing, it will never be the
same collage as the piece that you started with
and knew was finished, things change, that's
probably the hardest thing by placing things next to each
other that you wouldn't think normally would work, that's
when you get those discoveries and those a-ha moments that
this is my new direction that I go into. - Working with paper,
as anyone has done, when you're a child they have
memories of Elmer's glue, and it turns out to be like
a mountain of adhesive, and messiness, many people
when they approach her frame pieces, they see
them as digital cutouts, just because the process is
done in such a pristine way, there are some times
hidden messages, or hidden chasms that
people can explore visually, that maybe previous to that,
they've never thought about. (dramatic piano music) So this is an installation
piece from Amber Fletschock, this is the largest scale we've
had of hers, in the gallery, the installation has
probably been our most looked-at piece in this show. (dramatic piano music) - This installation was
created about two years ago, and at the time I was grieving
the loss of my mother, and I was having a hard time
concentrating on my work, the process of the cutting,
and the act of the repetition sort of became
like a meditation. When the viewer walks
in, they are confronted with a dark wall,
and beyond that they see a little shaft of
light, and then you arrive through blue sky, and
it goes to the earth, into the grass, and
then it blossoms. The whole goal is to have
people experience nature, go outside, notice
those little details, because it makes
life more precious, if we can see those things. (dramatic piano music) - [Voiceover] Prairie
Mosaic is funded by the Minnesota Arts and
Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote
of the people of Minnesota, on November fourth, 2008, the North Dakota
Council on the Arts, and by the members
of Prairie Public.
