Collect Your Identity – Handmade Personal Collages

Dana Labaton is a Communication graduate born in Argentina with a hobby she carried to her new homeland: collect everything she finds interesting. As a former copywriter, her landing in Israel with no Hebrew revolutionized her criteria of “reading”. She emphasized colors and shapes instead of letters and words.

Her collection of Israeli postcards, marketing material and graphic advertising grew bigger and bigger, and she started to recycle them into handmade collages. The art technique was a therapeutic discovery. An exercise to join pieces of her old life together with her new start; capturing all the recent experiences and people Dana explored in Israel. There are some pieces inspired in family, friends and loved ones called Portraits. Other are representative of a special occasion, or triggered by an emotion that pretend to be more of a typical “capture of time” but clearly not instant. All have some kind of freshness that expresses the transformation that took place in becoming Israeli. After being photographed, each collage is printed on canvas, making it possible to print in all sizes.

In her collages you can find Buttons, pieces from clothes ads, coins, keys, flyers of discotheques; everything joins to express the personality and spirit of the portrayed. Green tones with a little brown here and there complement with the chosen images to create Shimy, Dana’s husband collage.

Here a trip to Barcelona during the beginning of Bush’s decision to attack Iraq triggered a full production of graffiti around the city that Dana captured with her camera. On her way back, she complemented some of the pictures with the chosen postcards and souvenirs she brought from the Spanish city to create Urban Jungle.

Check out more of Dana’s collages: http://danacollages.carbonmade.com/