bittenbovine

she (🏳️‍⚧️) 🔞 x-acto blade enthusiast / glue stick connoisseur / silly puppy

[bittenbovine]

me when im leaving the grassy knoll

[bittenbovine]

me when im leaving midtown manhattan

[caniskunst]

grasp

12"x12"

[bittenbovine]

Collage, like jazz, is about the notes you don't play. When you start gluing, if you're not careful, you'll glue too many extra, wrong, bad notes onto the piece. When i select samples for a piece from my huge repository of materials, it's mainly a process of elimination, choosing which notes will definitely not be played.

there's a lot of corpses in classic art, and a lot of classic art coffee table books for cheap, and not a lot of my other pieces have really called for a corpse, or I've used other elements to make the memento mori. Putting all the corpses together was, in some ways, inevitable.

At first, this piece was going to use those corpses and more figures to form a wave of violence sweeping from the vanishing point towards two seated, and perhaps helpless, observers in the foreground. The final piece has more brevity. You are the observer. The deaths are quantifiable, contained. The suffering - the blood and tears around them - is swirling and chaotic and dizzying, and yet that is what you must look at to build a sense of perspective of the scene.

We all must bear witness to so many types of countable and semi-distant deaths with unimaginable suffering involved. Now there is another.

[caniskunst]

Celestial Bodies

12"x12" analog collage

[bittenbovine]

if someone were to ask me for analog collage advice, I think my first tip would be to never stop harvesting samples, harvest samples all the time, cut up anything and everything, cut out everything in whatever book you start cutting up, keep going, keep cutting, all the time, more than you ever think you'll use in your lifetime. then find some imperfect way to sort most of it.

every sample is going to have some way it most naturally lends itself to juxtaposition, perhaps some way that it once tied in to its own context, or didn't. The radiant gold sculpture didn't have anything between the prongs of its rays, the cow sculpture didn't have anything flowing into or out of its vessel, and the mannequin was looking at its own hand. through collage, the sculpture becomes more radiant, the cow holds something, and the mannequin is not looking at its hand but at the way funneled light flows around its fingers.

collage also presents opportunities for subtle humor (i.e., there's a subtle sun and MOOn motif going on here) and the more samples you have the more jokes you can make.

[caniskunst]

Precision

Analog collage, 12"x12"

[bittenbovine]

the centerpiece sample is of a las vegas dancer riding a mechanical bull shaped like a balloon animal. I was so enamored with this image, I needed to construct a collage for it, a quirky world fit for this expression of whimsy and mirth and joy.

The cucumber boat, the cucumber fan, the guava corona, and other touches are from a book of garnishes. The river is made of photographs of the snowy Andes mountains, but "upside-down" to look like reflections on water.

The poem on top is about finding good love after bad love. This is the "Precision", as opposed to, say, "Accuracy." Having found good love, now there are many days where i feel so overjoyed that i feel like a cute little cucumber boat has pulled alongside the ornate urn and giant balloon animal that i'm drifting down life's river upon. Sometimes i think of the mundane ways that good love can make you feel such joy as little cucumber boat garnishes

[caniskunst]

Welcome

Analog collage, 12"x12"

[bittenbovine]

when you start collecting collage materiel (material?) you'll very quickly end up with a lot of text, a lot of it black letters on white backgrounds. and there's only so much you can do with that. A lot of my other pieces (Coven, Place of Particular Magic, Precision) use these bits of text to make a poetic accompaniment to the image beneath it. A lot of contemporary collage does the same.

I wanted this piece to take an opposite approach with the same samples. The white behind the text becomes the white sky of the background, the letters are obscured by leaves and fruits, and no single sample has any big piece of meaning on its own. Take the impression you get from the words you see and carry it with you as your eye travels down the piece - as you are "welcomed" into this grove and this gallery.

[caniskunst]

Growth

[bittenbovine]

i love love love love collaging with black and white architecture samples. When the color palate of all my samples matches, I'm liberated to play around more with juxtapositions of shape and texture and perspective, and have something in the end that still looks *good*. I've often thought of an analog collage as something of a recorded performance - it's several hours of permanent decisions, because you only have so many samples that you can only cut up once, and only so much time in your day, and you can't do much tweaking after the glue dries. Working with black and white architectural samples feels akin to playing the 12-bar-blues - it's a little easier to get into the "vibe" or "flow state" of things, but there's just as much room for expression there as anywhere else.

The female figure was liberated from a copy of THE BIGGER DAMNER BOOK OF SHEER MANLINESS where she adorned a list of slang words for boobs and a list of slang words for penises. In this context, I think she represents something better - power, presence, control, aura. She is at home in the world around her, but she's the best part of it

[caniskunst]

Architecture for Dogs

Analog collage, 12"x12"

[bittenbovine]

I found a little book on Viennese modernism in a local used bookstore - filled with great information on the movement and scene, plenty of pictures of all the arts in that scene, and a treasure trove of black-and-white architectural photographs. Once the disjointed, monochrome, early-20th-century cityscape was assembled, the natural next step was to pair it with canines (who don't see color and don't understand architecture) and film-noir-esque text about loveless life in an inhospitable place.

[caniskunst]

Coven

Analog collage, 12"x12"

[bittenbovine]

(all my collage art is going to go on @caniskunst from now on, just to claim the blog name and park my growing portfolio there)

this isn't my first collage but it's the earliest one that i'll put on display. it's reflective of the small amount of sample materials and the journalling/diary-keeping approach to art I had at the time. Now, I'd want to put a good background behind everything, and I'd have maybe too much paper to choose from to do that. When composing this (November 2024), juxtaposing the words and objects here already put me at the "this piece is basically done!" state. Which isn't to say that the piece strikes me now as "unfinished", I think that the sparse and impressionistic sense of scale and place works with the blizzard white-out background of the backing paper.

It's about finding oneself while/through finding transfeminine community.

it's mainly made of a natgeo issue about witches, vote-by-mail ballot papers, and a french anthropology book.

[bittenbovine]

it's Sinkdog!!!!

[catboybiologist]

A good friend of mine started a podcast!!!

Pilot - The Misogynist Question | Odium Symposium

Get more from Odium Symposium on Patreon

Helen is a good friend of mine, and has been very influential in developing a lot of my worldview as a trans woman.

This is a banger of a start to a podcast, and if you enjoy picking apart the sheer stupidity of misogyny, this is really fun listen.

[bittenbovine]

I also really really like Helen and i made the art for the pod

[catboybiologist]

A good friend of mine started a podcast!!!

Pilot - The Misogynist Question | Odium Symposium

Get more from Odium Symposium on Patreon

Helen is a good friend of mine, and has been very influential in developing a lot of my worldview as a trans woman.

This is a banger of a start to a podcast, and if you enjoy picking apart the sheer stupidity of misogyny, this is really fun listen.

[bittenbovine]

me when im leaving the grassy knoll

[bittenbovine]

me when im leaving midtown manhattan

[bittenbovine]

me when im leaving <reference to current events>

[vicki-elo-1972]

[bittenbovine]

Is the back patch u made spray painted? And if so what kind? I’ve been trying to find smth that works well as white on black but won’t fade or be weird and crunchy </3 looks sick as fuck by the way i Love the design

thank you!!!!! 🐺🐺🐺 It's fabric spray paint. It's a little crunchy but that's not a big problem (so far) for a patch that doesn't do much flexing/twisting

[juliaseranodebergerac]

it turns out having a girl in my bed tell me “i’m basically a chewtoy, so bite me as much as you want” was the cure to 74% of my mental illness. who knew!

[bittenbovine]

I was that chewtoy!!!! 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

[bittenbovine]

made this patch for my girlfriend's jacket

[juliaseranodebergerac]

since I’m now seeing this post of the backpatch my girlfriend made for my jacket showing up on my dash again, thought I’d share this photo of me wearing it…

[bittenbovine]

Sex marks i have sustained: bruises, welts, bites, hickeys, scratches

Sex marks i still need to experience: burns, lacerations, punctures, abrasions, incisions, avulsions, excisions,

[bittenbovine]

✅️ incision