Great surrealist thinkers have always challenged ideas of consciousness and composition through the practices of prose, thought, form and aesthetic. Working within the discipline of graphic design, I co-opted the agenda of André Breton’s 1920s Surrealist manifesto to explore these concepts through unusual juxtapositions. My process started with compiling examples of composite imagery, nonsensical objects, and I also went through a process of creating word puzzles and aimless mind maps. As these pieces began to come together—juxtaposed spatially and formally, I found myself making unexpected connections and finding overlapping meaning within these normally unrelated things. I began to realize a certain beauty in these "chance encounters"—moments of duplicity, and systems of organization.
It is said that our reality is organized along an axis of binary opposition: black/white, good/evil, highbrow/lowbrow, typography/image, form/content, and so on. The act of juxtaposition also revealed more of the strange space that lies between the categorizations through which we live and orbit. In response to these concepts, I have curated and juxtaposed various surrealist works with the composite experimentations I conducted. I also incorporated a pictographic typeface I made that overlaps mundane objects with the alphabet, creating a glitch-like experience in the text. Through these outcomes, I aim to deconstruct these polarities and perhaps find something interesting, perhaps even humorous, in the grey areas between them.