A.P.

Fiedler

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A.P. Fiedler

A.P. Fiedler’s collages are studies in containment, where everyday infrastructures like barriers, fences, and gloves become charged with anxiety. Each piece is layered with squares, rectangles, and circles, marked by caution tape and procedural intent. There’s a neutrality to the imagery, but the repetition of warning signs pulled from ULINE catalogs, mixed with his film photography, creates unsettling feelings. Like safety manuals gone wrong, they ask: what are we protecting, and from whom?

In the Words of the Artist

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At times, my creative practice feels extremely healthy and rewarding, a natural and compulsive flow, the uncovering of hidden truths. Other times it feels contentious, an uphill battle. Both states seem to help my practice in different ways. I am a musician as well as a visual artist, so I am able to bounce back and forth, which provides a nice distance that I find to be very helpful.

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I view both as modular works. Collage and song are the ultimate result of a collection of disparate parts, reordered and restructured until you can comfortably call the piece “finished”. Chords, melodies, structure, rhythm are replaced with form, color, composition, and symbol. The pieces in both are easily shaped in a sculptural way. Songwriting feels more like discovering the figure hiding within a block of marble, whereas collage feels like building a piece of furniture piece by piece.

Collage exists largely as an exercise in composition for me. How colors, shapes, and, to a lesser extent, images fit together. It’s less about summoning an idea and then manifesting it in a way that feels close to how I imagine it, and more about piecing fragments together in a puzzle only I know the answer to. The themes or messages reveal themselves after the fact.

It’s difficult for me not to fixate on the glaring elements of violence and beauty in constant collision with each other everywhere you look. I don’t necessarily explore this idea consciously, but looking back on my work so far, this seems to be a recurring idea.

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I begin with taking photos, a relatively new creative practice. Going on long, long walks, and taking pictures of anything I want, trying not to limit myself. After getting the photos developed, I started to notice the types of things I was attracted to; I’d describe it as either violent industrial design or elements of a spiritual nature. Next, I was looking through a ULINE catalog and felt completely captivated by the product photos and design. I started cutting the images out and arranging them without even really thinking about collage. Finally, I bought some glue to stop the pieces from blowing away.

Whenever I’m writing music, I am reminded to relax and listen to what the song requires. I’m not the first to point out that songwriting can often feel as if you are an antenna receiving a signal from some… other source; call it intuition, or God, or anything you want. The more fluent you are on an instrument the more attuned you are to the process of receiving, translating, playing, and writing music.

My desire is to become more fluent on as many instruments as possible as a way to receive a myriad of signals. Music is, for me, much more of a flow state than collage. Collage is like a difficult math equation, with a correct solution that I am tasked with solving. The answer may be broadcast from the same source, but getting there is about tactile manipulation and friction, not flow.

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About the Artist

A.P. Fiedler is a self-taught artist and musician based in Portland, Oregon, working across illustration, painting, and collage. His creative practice began in the Denver punk scene, where he designed flyers and album artwork for local bands and artists. Over time, this work evolved into a broader visual language marked by a recurring vocabulary of tangled forms and symbolic repetition. While his approach has grown more expansive, Fiedler continues to collaborate closely with musicians and bands, maintaining a deep connection between his visual art and the world of sound.

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