Artist M.M. Dupay sometimes has to dig deep to find the images for her work.
That may be into files, stuffed with pictures of musical instruments or teeth from Rome.
That may be into the piles of magazines and catalogs retrieved from her grandmother’s home.
With scissors and glue and colored pencil, she sips and combines these pictures, drawn to connecting
disparate images in a way that seems just beyond her control.
What emerges over a period of years are collages that capture the eye and belie the arduous, close work
that goes into their creation.
Dupay’s collages have captured critical attention close to home at The Toledo Museum of Art’s Area Artist
Show and far afield at the Top Ten Women in the Arts International at ARTROM Gallery in Rome this
spring.
Appropriate for an art that’s rooted in the unexpected, Dupay came to collaging through a back door.
Early in her studies at Marietta College in the mid-1980s, she was given an assignment to paste together
some images as a study for a painting.
She liked the study better than the painting.
She was working in the college’s art gallery at the time, so her mind was crowded with images. Dupay got
to wondering what would happen if cherished figures from famous paintings “just got up and walked away.”
What if a couple from a Dutch master’s work happened into a room created by a French surrealist painted
centuries later?
“I cut up my art history book,” Dupay said. “I was really attracted to the act of cutting and pasting and
removing something from its original context and putting it in a new context and seeing what came out.
But I also discovered that the more I planned it, the worse it came out.”
So she labors slowly, digging through a collection of images, inspired by the way an infant’s prone body
looks like a rock bass player, and the way an ecstatic toddler’s head fits onto the body. The shoulder’s
not quite right, but a flamingo wing is perfect, and pink cotton candy woven into the toddler’s hair
provides the right touch of color.
That’s just one corner of “Losing My Religion,” a recently completed collage.
Dupay, who teaches in the Bowling Green State University School of Art, has her sources for images. Her
officemate at BGSU, art historian Ruthy Light, brings her fashion magazines from Paris.
But a major treasure trove came from her grandmother, an “obsessive compulsive hoarder.”
After her death, amidst the jars of pins and drawers of toothpaste, were piles of magazines and books of
crochet patterns dating back to the 1920s.
From this repository, Dupay draws inspiration. She builds up layers of overlapping pieces of paper. In a
work in progress she fits a pottery rabbit onto a 19th century woman’s shoe. She adds beads and a cameo
to the shoe. “This has six levels of ornamentation.”
In another section of “Losing My Religion,” she has added beads and a skull to rosary beads held by
praying hands, which she has carefully cut apart so one “finger seems to be caressing the landscape.”
She uses colored pencils to adjust shading and coloring, blending dye casts and paper dating to different
time periods.
Dupay didn’t use pencil at first. But, she said, “I was having problems getting the illusion of the
imagery to work because you were too aware of the edges.”
As the work continues, some collages resist coming together; pieces may find their way from one collage
to another. In each, Dupay says, there always seems to be an actor caught in “a pregnant pause” between
one event and another.
“The doneness of the image,” she said, “comes when I think I’ve ruined it. … I pushed it to a point I’m
almost sick and crying because I think I’ve ruined it.”
She coats them with a plastic medium that gives them just a slight sheen and a uniform surface.
Only then is it ready for the finishing touches, the framing which Dupay considers an integral part of
the art, and the titling.
Sometimes she has a phrase or two running through as she works, jotting it in pencil in the margins. Or
she has nothing. She draws on the resources of her partner, Julie Haught, who teaches English at BGSU.
Once when she had a major exhibit and a number of pieces to title, she, Haught and friends Gaby Davis
and Sharon Barnes, with the help of beer and poetry, set about titling them.
Once named and framed, they are ready for the world.
They are best viewed in a gallery, where the subtle topography of their surfaces can be appreciated.
In a photograph, they could be a digital print. Indeed, as her students tell her, she could use Photoshop
software to create these images.
But having the collages fashioned by hand is essential to their creation, Dupay said. “There is something
about the physical act of cutting, that certain resistance when the scissors meet paper.” And a certain
risk. “I have one shot to cut it right.”
She attributes this love of working with her hands in part to being the daughter of a father who was a
mechanic and a mother who was a musician.
Or, she quips, “maybe I just like to torture myself.”
Still, her images have been widely disseminated on the internet. A gallery of 10 of her collages is on
view now at: www.artromnetwork.com/Women_in_the_Arts_nov2014/mm_dupay.htm
But the ideal viewing experience for her is what occurred in Rome — though she was not able to travel
there — when on Slow Art Day, viewers sat and contemplated one image for a period of time, and then
poets turned their observations into poems.
“That meant more to me just because sometimes images are consumed way too quickly,” then she adds with a
laugh, “says the person who spends how many years cutting paper.”
