Karl has very strong opinions and he is clearly dedicated to his artwork as a form of expression, and I like the shape his work takes. You can tell that there is a fierce motivation behind everything he does. But enough from me, read on and his work will speak for itself!

Karl Noyes
www.roosterhouse.org, www.paperonpaper.com
Minneapolis

Describe your work in 10 words or less.

Semi-failed attempts to make sense of the now.

What do you like to work with (magazines, photographs, vintage)? Be specific!

I like working with the impersonal media around us. Notes found on the street, parking tickets, pornography, newspapers, food wrappers, advertising. We are saturated in impersonal and inhuman media. We soak it in by our nature and we must dissect it, remove it from its context to understand its continually perversive nature. Thus I tend to work with what is around me.

How long have you been creating collages and what made you start?

My first collages were put together in high school art classes. I went back to collage as soon as I fled the education system. I went through a couple years of detoxification and realized that every pillar that was in place for generations before us like marriage, religion, meat-eating, child bearing, government, occupations, education have grown into personal enslavement tools. These and institutions like them are the largest forms of shams; all substitutes for one thinking for one's self. And our responsibility in this current state of mass information is to diffuse the lies, discern the truth and most of all trust ourselves and our hearts beyond any social pressures. For most of human history, people existed in peace without these shams and collage by its destructive nature helps recover the intuitions necessary to understand motivations and symbols. In the United States we have a government that assassinates its gifted artists. In the near future privacy will be exitinct and genetic engineering will do what it can to control randomness. We as a species have only a short time to create before feral and intuitive artists are selectively eliminated from the gene pool. There is no time for tv, protesting or voting; we must create now.

Are you solely an artist, or do you work in another profession?

I work for myself and take care of the economics via many of the techniques John Hoffman discusses in his "Art and Science of Dumpster Diving" books. I've worked as a security guard, motor oil monkey, library page, lab rat, gas station clerk, baker, etc etc etc and all of it drudgery. There are few things more humiliating and soul-destroying than working for someone else. So I dig in dumpsters and I find ways to be self-sustainable.

Do you have any formal art training?

No. My art training began when I started this long string of dropping out.

Explain your favourite techniques.

I feel I am working well when I am losing conscious understanding, just shifting paper on the table, acting on whims. It's the closest I can get to the dream state alone and awake.

Describe your favourite piece ever created.

I like "Vacation at Marlboro Mountain".

What other artists do you admire?

Philip K. Dick, Low, Shohei Ooka, Crew Jones, Kathy Acker, J.G. Ballard, Joe Cunningham, William S. Burroughs, Kevin "Berserker" Hagen, Alexander Calder, Sweet J.A.P, John Hoff, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kafka, Emily Hayes, Charles Gatewood, Charlie Parr.

Thanks Karl!