Andrea

Mortson

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Andrea Mortson’s visual practice explores the language of images embedded in our cultural landscape. She moves between collage, painting, and drawing, deconstructing familiar imagery—from art-world tropes to picture-book motifs—repurposing them within experimental narratives. This approach reclaims agency over the stories that shape our understanding, transforming recognizable images into tools for questioning and disrupting normative discourse. For Mortson, collage uniquely reflects how we construct coherence from fragments, shaping meaning from disparate pieces. Her collages challenge the notion of a fixed image, prompting us to reconsider how we seek resolution within layered visual experiences.

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As a visual artist, I feel a responsibility to engage with pervasive images. Moving between analog collage, painting and drawing, I separate visual constructs from their intended functions, disassemble them, and use them instead in conversations that are amorphous and experimental. In this way, familiar conceits from the art world like “figure in a landscape”; bankable tropes from the picture book world like anthropomorphic animals; and motivational cues from the DIY world like staged “afters”, become prime materials for disrupting normative discourse. By using them to create new images, I work to exercise some agency in the narratives that surround me.

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I don't intend to communicate fixed themes in my practice, but some inescapable themes arise when you’re working in the medium of collage, like the role of constructed images in our cultural environment and the power of discernment in processing them. Creating paper collages using popular printed material, as I do, makes it necessary to also think about appropriation and collaboration in this context. And because I work predominantly with found images from publications that predate the new millennium, a consideration of nostalgia is similarly embedded in my work.

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I started using popular children’s books and domestic design volumes from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s because I was attracted to their paper quality and palette, and because there seemed to be an unending supply of them at second-hand stores. I continue to favour them because they contain images that papered my early life and were designed to influence my behaviour, whether by encouraging emotional attachments to franchised cartoon characters or by inspiring the feelings of inadequacy required to make me a better consumer. Because of the relentless imposition of these images acting on me, I feel compelled to act on them.

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How we complete an image through the act of looking and imaging is an unconscious expression of who we are—it embodies how we’ve learned to understand the world and contextualize our experience. A collage is a powerful expression of this process because it’s composed of disarticulated scraps that we, with our human centric vision, are compelled to conceive of as a complete narrative—ideally, one that provides answers to our own condition. Collage plays with the fiction that an image can ever be static and entirely understood.

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Andrea Mortson (b. 1969) is a Canadian collage artist and painter based in Sackville, New Brunswick, whose work examines how constructed images fuel humancentric perspectives and reinforce narcissistic narratives.

Mortson has exhibited widely, including in Spain at Los Raros: New Narratives in Contemporary Collage, an international show by The Weird Show, and in Oh, Canada, MASS MoCA’s survey of contemporary Canadian art. Her work was also featured in Galerie de l’UQAM’s Le Projet Peinture, a snapshot of painting in Canada. A recipient of the Marie Hélène Allain Fellowship Award, Mortson has been longlisted for both the Sobey Art Award and the RBC Investments Painting Competition. Her work resides in private and institutional collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank, New Brunswick Art Bank, Confederation Centre Art Gallery (PEI), Nova Scotia Art Gallery (Halifax), and Owens Art Gallery (Sackville).

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