Conner Reddan

Conner Reddan is a budding lawyer and a growing artist – currently waiting to be sworn-in as an attorney in New York City. Conner grew up on the south shore of Long Island, where he developed a love of illustration, cartooning, and comics as modes of visual storytelling. This led to him to pursue an undergraduate degree in film production, where he discovered the medium of analog collage.

 

Conner’s art practice spans a variety of mediums including analog collage, drawing and painting, filmmaking, photography, screenwriting, and acting. Rather than view these as isolated practices, he prefers to treat these as one interrelated artistic discipline that allows for the expression of different ideas suitable to each respective medium. Conner views his art practice as essential to creating a sense of balance in his life and an escape from the runaround of daily life. Regardless of what medium he finds himself engaged with, his work is largely influenced by his background in filmmaking. In this way, he strives to produce images that project upon the viewer the sense of a greater narrative beyond the bounds of the frame. The result often produces an atmosphere of mystery or ambiguity that invites the viewer to join in on the dream.

 

"I use analog collage art as an escape hatch out of plain reality to step deeper into the human experience by cutting, snipping, and shredding whole images into fragments before rearranging them into something more moving or profound", explains Conner. This is a process of undermining certainty in service of questions that only occasionally are met with answers. Using found materials, vintage or discarded magazines and books, Conner treats images like selective memories refracted through a mirror. Compositions are developed based on the interaction of materials, and all of the qualities of the image – be it the subject, texture, color, paper stock, etc. – have a voice in the dialogue.

 

"I often work on many pieces at the same time", Conner underlines, "guided by the resonance between images and observing the way they attract to each other like magnets". Most recently, Conner exhibited his analog collage work in his first ever solo showcase at Solas Studios in New York.