Poet Shanna Compton’s new book, Deep Whoosh (Black Square Editions), offers fifty cut-and-paste collages created over four months in 2020. As a way of taking her mind off the news, Compton writes in the book, she “spread out a pile of materials, grabbed my X-ACTO knives and a jar of YES! Paste, and made collages every day.”
Shanna Compton, Cover of Deep Whoosh.
For material, Compton used pieces of her own hand-printed monotype papers and upcycled proofs from linocuts or drawings. She notes that the typescript pieces that appear in several collages are from a poem by Catie Rosemurgy left over after Compton created the cover art for her chapbook First the Burning.
Shanna Compton, (GROANS SOFTLY), collage, 7 x 5 in. “A forlorn grayscale giraffe floating up to her long neck in rising seas, surrounded by icebergs and ominous hot pink triangles on speckled warm gray cardstock.” This collage appeared in the UMVA exhibition Washed Away at the Portland Public Library.
Shanna Compton, (MURMURS DISTRACTEDLY), collage, 5 x 7 in. “featuring a grayscale cockatoo with his mouth open, talking, surrounded by bright abstract shapes in yellow-green, hot pink, and blue against speckled warm gray cardstock.”
Compton embraces incongruity in her art and poetry. She maintains a “stash” of “good ‘bits and pieces’” that aligns with the paper ephemera that gather on her studio table, “ready to be pasted in or layered under as needed, or to serve as a first mark on a blank surface.”
In an afterword essay, Compton recounts her long-term issues with hearing. When she began reading sounds in the form of closed captions, she incorporated some of them into poems and collages. “Nonverbal sound effects in CC and SDH [subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing] are especially fascinating bits of language,” she writes.
The closed-captioned collages reference various themes, including climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, “unchecked American gun violence,” and her upbringing in Texas. They are wonderfully surreal and brilliant.
Shanna Compton, (ELECTRICAL WIRES FAINTLY CRACKLING), collage, 5 x 7 in. “Depicts a family of mother, father, young daughter, and even younger son in a sepia-toned vintage photograph, but their faces are obscured. Each family member has a bright pink teardrop over their features, except the little girl, whose face is a bright yellow flame. Above the family, a blue and pink view of outer space swirls.”
Via email, Compton answered questions that draw from this issue’s theme description.
CL: What compels you to integrate words into your art? When did you start doing this?
SC: I don’t always integrate words into my visual art, but I am a poet and book designer too, with a background in letterpress printing, so sometimes words just come into a piece, or if not words, just letterforms. And the titles for visual pieces are sometimes poetic phrases, like In the Meadow, A Glass House or Goldenrod Days, etc.
In this case, the project [Deep Whoosh] started with the closed captions. I’d been collecting them in a notebook, thinking I’d write with them, but I realized I was also interested in them as visual elements, and the way they are part of my viewing experience when watching movies. I like the dark boxes, light type, the nonverbal indicator of the parentheses. I like the way they look. So, I decided to put them in collages instead of into poems.
Shanna Compton, (DEEP WHOOSH), collage with wax crayon, 7 x 5 in. “A dark green polar bear facing left, standing on an iceberg of torn ivory typescript against speckled warm gray cardstock. A single hot pink eye watches over the bear from the upper left. Black hand-drawn marks outline the imagery in dotted lines.”
CL: How do you see the verbal and the visual working together? What do you seek to achieve by combining them?
SC: The idea I had was loose, but it was basically found sounds plus found images—and I wanted them not to be too matchy. Sometimes closed captions can appear a little before or a little after the visual they are meant to go with onscreen. The disjunction is interesting, and not-quite hearing or mishearing is a big part of my lived experience. So, I was trying to get at that, kind of.
CL: Do you think that the presence of words enhances the efficacy of an image?
SC: It depends, I guess. I don’t need them in other people’s visual work as a rule, but when someone’s incorporating text or letters or handwriting, I’m attracted to that often. I know a lot of painters who write words on the canvas, but when the painting is done, they are no longer really legible, or no longer there at all. So, the words aren’t part of my experience as a viewer directly, but they informed the painting somehow anyway. But then you have mural artists like Ryan Adams and Rachel Gloria Adams, and the words are integral for sure—the murals are literally saying something.
These particular collages of mine would not be as interesting to me without the sound effects—usually my collages are more abstract—so in this case, yes, the words make the pieces work or work differently than they would without them.
Shanna Compton, (THUMPING GETTING LOUDER AND FASTER), collage, 5 x 7 in. “A vintage photograph of a blindfolded woman with a large bow in her braided hair and a high-collared blouse on kraft brown cardstock. A red and white zinnia flower behind her head and some fire in the lower section of the composition suggests an explosion, while a white multilingual sign in front of her features a blue gas mask icon and the words ‘Wear Respirator.’”
Shanna Compton, (ROMANTIC LYRICS), collage with wax crayon, 7 x 5 in. “An angry, male red-bell-pepper headed ping pong player in tennis whites surrounded by billowing smoke and black hand-drawn marks on brown kraft cardstock.”
CL: Are there artists you turn to for inspiration?
SC: I have a quotation by Ed Ruscha in the book [“Sometimes found words are the most pure because they have nothing to do with you”], and his Word Paintings are some of my favorites. I recently saw Ice Princess in Fort Worth, but I’ve always loved the humorous OOF, and the synesthetic effect (on me) of Smells Like Back of Old Hot Radio. I can smell that and feel it, but it’s not just the words—it’s also the color and the diffuse sort of glowy way he painted the words.
So for this series I was thinking of those paintings, as well as other poet-collagists I admire, like John Yau and Sarah Jane Sloat. And Joe Brainard is a big influence for me—he used a lot of text in his pieces, either collaged in like Pope Weak from a newspaper, or painted from a label like 7 UP or Cinzano, or done in comics-style lettering, as in the Nancy cartoon pieces.
Full view of the image at top: Shanna Compton, (CLAMOROUS CROWD NOISE), collage with wax crayon, 5 x 7 in. “A many-horned hooved monster with ferocious teeth, though he seems kind of friendly amid the playful context of bright pink, yellow, and aqua shapes and black hand-drawn marks. A pair of vintage 3-D glasses floats behind him.” Click to enlarge.
Captions courtesy of the artist. All images from Deep Whoosh (Black Square Editions, 2025).
Compton manages the UMVA website. She also has designed many of the books for Black Square Editions. More info on her website.