Beautifully Vibrant Afrofuturism Collages

The world of collages is alive and well, thanks to a plethora of digital tools, and more and more artists creating new and exciting visual mashups.

Kaylan Michel is a self-taught designer and artist, based in Montreal, focusing on fierce and beautiful portrait collages in the style of Afrofuturism.  Her mixed media approach uses all manner of objects and visual metaphors, coalescing into a distinctive, hyper-vibrant style.

She works under the moniker Lost in the Island, and was inspired by a range of post-modernism artists, but also pop culture references, and her own African heritage. We love the mixed media approach, using flowers, flying saucers, cat eyes and more to create such distinctive and rich detailed art.

Via Trendland:

Being originally from Africa, I look up to African art and afro futuristic art styles. I love patterns, colors and designs that represent my roots.

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“I love the fact that each person can see different things in one piece of art and relate to it. Some artists I look up to are: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, and a New York based artist Kehinde Wiley. I love the energy behind their work, it truly inspires me.”

Afrofuturism has been a current in music, film and art since Sun Ra, and Michel’s collages sit in a long lineage that runs through Octavia Butler’s fiction, the album covers of Parliament-Funkadelic and, most visibly, the world building of Black Panther. Her recurring flying saucer hat, the dotted face markings and the gold jewelry are a shorthand for that mix of ancestry and science fiction. We have written about her again, in a closer look at Kaylan Michel’s bold Afrofuturism, and the movement’s broader vocabulary lives in our glossary of visual culture. For collage in a very different register, see Uğur Gallenkuş’s split images of rich and poor.

By Moss & Fog Staff

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