Community Collage

Photography has come a long way in the past twenty years. Film is practically obsolete, teens have better cameras than their parents, and, thanks to the magic of Photoshop, there’s no need to actually be in the same room when posing for a family portrait.

Sigh.

Local artist Corinne Geertsen learned Photoshop at Mesa Community College a few years ago as a way of preserving family photos, then used the technology to fuse multiple images into surrealistic collages. Some of the results currently displayed in her “Psychological Images of Sophistication and Quirk” exhibit are fantastic. Says Geertsen, “I think of the pictures as ongoing stories and fables that present psychological predicaments. I’m always happy when they’re funny but true.”

In the show, a seascape featuring a weird diving machine and a woman in Victorian dress looks like something out of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. In another piece titled Migratory, a toddler in a boat is perched atop a giant tortoise. What inspires these imaginative works? “Quirkiness runs in my family,” she says. “I have always had far more ideas than I can stuff into one picture.”

Nov. 10-Jan. 14, 2009