The world of well-conceived collage (or assemblage) has long been of interest to me. The act of dismantling, disordering, cutting out, displacing and out of this creating new order holds a certain clever appeal; familiar objects or faces assume and assert new meaning when taken out of familiar context, re-informed with changed meaning when the canvas shifts under knife and glue.

Laurie Blakeslee, who was originally trained as a painter, continues in the tradition of subversion of meaning through her photo-based collage work in the body of work Styled Life. Recalling catalogs and fashion magazines of her childhood, Blakeslee alters and re-photographs these excerpted images "...with the intention of interrogating the original purpose these images present—the myth that consumer goods hold the promise of happiness, self-worth and most importantly, social status."

Charm Curl, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

All Combed Cotton, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

While the history of contemporary art records the names of famous male artists as the most well known practitioners of collage (Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell come to mind), the usually intimate small size and introspective nature of the process make it ripe for the double-entendres and Feminist critique that occur when a woman is wielding the cutters and storyboarding the montage. While Hannah Höch created famous political satires in the Dadaist tradition, and Bauhaus artist Marianne Brandt would specifically address the evils of fascism through hers, it is the work of relatively unknown Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue whose tone and output most closely aligns with what Blakeslee is working with today.

Untitled, from Toshiko Okanoue's Drop of Dreams by Nazraeli Press

As a young, unmarried woman living through the reconstruction period in postwar Japan, Okanoue began making photo collages. From Nazraeli press:

She cut out the photographs that - in her own words -"fit my dreams" and arranged them on black flocked paper. "Those scraps of my fantasies turned into strangely interesting things," she said, "things I would not have thought of. Emboldened and delighted by the results, I made one collage after another."

Much like Okanoue's investigations with the same form (and some of the same types of original period materials), Blakeslee uses glamorized and idealized representations of the feminine to call out inherent contradictions within what is projected and expected of women and their role in traditional society versus what that same woman's experience and fantasies of that life might actually be. In Charm Curl (the first image above), the perfect ringlet curls on a daughter's head mimic both the tighter, more controlled hairstyle of her mother (pictured in background) as well as the long curled tail of the colorful horse in foreground, itself a popular icon of what passes for the acceptable girlhood extracurricular. In B. Rayon Romaine (pictured below), a typical catalog shot of a post-war era housewife wearing clothes both feminine and proper is interrupted by a superimposed loud, red feather, intimating something that is both burlesque and meant to be hidden from sight.

B. Rayon Romaine, from the series Styled Life by Laurie Blakeslee

As a large swath of America is currently obsessed with the stylings and fast-changing cultural mores depicted in Mad Men, it seems a ripe time for Blakelee to push this visual investigation further, weaving a more complex theme and methodology in the wake of her montages.

More from the ongoing series Styled Life can be seen at Blakeslee's website, as well as other bodies of work.