Doren Robbins, Fusing the Dream with Mixed-Media Works

Doren Robbins is a poet, essayist, and mixed media artist. His writings have appeared in Kayak, Sulfur, Third Rail, and many other journals. Summer 2021 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems, 1975-2015.

_{Erotic’s Gravitate Version 6}

My work is connected to the originating DADA and Surrealist traditions of fusing the dream into works of fine art, collage, photomontage, and mixed-media works, many of which are discussed in artist-and-subject-specific exhibits and catalogues of exhibitions, Herta Wescher’s book Collage, Robert Motherwell’s The DADA Painters and Poets, and Marjorie Perloff’s The Futurist Moment.

_{Feminine with shadows}

In part, to me the fantasy is in the euphoria of arrangement and the directing emotion. Something must be present in the images, something like what Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca referred to as Duende, an incident of imagination, a type of imponderable intensity.

_{Simultaneous Visitors}

Over the last fifteen years collages and mixed-media works have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Agave, Angry Old Man, Caliban, Contemporary Art, Empty Mirror, Otoliths, Red Wheelbarrow, Quora, and Third Rail: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Literature. Two pieces were exhibited at the Paterson Museum of Art exhibit: Crossing Boundaries: Visual Art by Writers, exhibit 2006. In 2019 The International Museum of Collage and Assemblage published three mixed-media works in their Catalogue of New Acquisitions.