Hand-cut collages, 9 x 12 in.
Mike Fernandez
Mike Fernandez builds with pieces. Morning meditations transform colorful hand-cut cardstock into small, intimate compositions, a subtle interplay of color, weight, and negative space, until the work balances on its own. The language is clear and graphic; color carries feeling, geometry sets the tempo.
In the Words of the Artist
Hand-cut collages, 9 x 12 in.
The theme and content of my work are constantly evolving. Lately, I’ve been drawn to design-based collage—creating organic, architectural shapes and using them like building blocks to form compositions and sculptural arrangements. This process allows me to explore structure and play simultaneously, merging intuitive shape-making with a sense of spatial design.
For me, collage is a form of visual reconstruction—a way of taking what already exists and reshaping it into something new. It’s about staying present, following where the work wants to go, and enjoying the process of discovery. The themes in my work are always shifting, but there’s often a thread of nostalgia running through it all.
I have “morning meditations,” where I collage during the first hour after waking—working from that calm, unfiltered state of mind. The night before, I usually spend a few hours cutting out shapes and objects, organizing them by color or subject. This rhythm keeps me connected to the tactile side of making.
Hand-cut collages, 9 x 12 in.
I’m drawn to imagery from the 1980s—especially advertising, design, and architectural magazines. For a while, I was sourcing Italian architectural publications from that era. I love the bold use of primary colors—reds, yellows, and blues—and the playful graphic energy of the time. Those ads also carry a lot of subcultural ephemera that feed into my visual language.
I think new technologies will continue to expand what collage can be—pushing visual narratives further through the mix of analog and digital materials. The boundaries between hand-made and digitally constructed work will keep dissolving, opening up exciting new possibilities.
Hand-cut collages, 9 x 12 in.
Hand-cut collages, 9 x 12 in.
I’m mostly just trying to make sense of what’s in front of me—solving a design problem through shape, color, and rhythm. But I guess that instinct to rebuild or rework things still comes from somewhere deeper, a need to create order or meaning out of chaos. I’ll shift things around, step back, and look for that moment when the composition feels like it’s breathing on its own. It develops a voice and tells me to stop!
The nostalgia in my latest work feels very postmodern—at times even evoking a bit of Memphis Milano energy. The series carries a sense of irony, too. One of my dads was a ceramic artist, and we did a father-and-son show when I was ten. I remember thinking, “This is art, right?”—looking at all these odd shapes and compositions. That memory came back to me while making these pieces.
Hand-cut collages, 9 x 12 in.
Hand-cut collages, 9 x 12 in.
About the Artist
Mike Fernandez is a Los Angeles-based mixed-media artist working under OJOSEXO STUDIO. Rooted in architecture, Bauhaus, and postmodern ideas, his fashion background in New York informs a clean, constructed visual language. He moves between digital, Polaroid, and 35mm photography, building hand-cut collages from his own images and from vintage ads, bodybuilding magazines, and subcultural ephemera. Recent large-scale works translate cut paper into acrylic and plaster on canvas, slipping between print, painting, and assemblage.
Raised in Sacramento and San Francisco, and the son of gay fathers, he showed alongside his ceramicist father at eleven, an early start that shaped his attention to shape, color, and form. A Fine Arts and Vidal Sassoon Academy alum, he has exhibited internationally and appeared in publications. Through OJOSEXO STUDIO, FERNANDEZ works at the intersection of fashion, photography, and contemporary art, where past and present images are sampled, rebuilt, and set in motion.
Fernandez has an opening of new paintings and collages this Friday November 21st from 5-10pm at Winston Studios in DTLA.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
ALIX CLÉO ROUBAUD (1952–1983) was a Canadian-born photographer and writer whose brief life yielded a body of work marked by philosophical rigor and lyrical self-inquiry. Her photographs merge text, body, and experiment, exploring perception, time, and mortality through layered negatives and diaristic fragments.
JEFFERSON FOUQUET is a Paris-based floral stylist, set designer, and collagist whose work fuses botanical sculpture with cut-paper montage. Across commissions and exhibitions, he builds precise, sensorial tableaux that treat flowers as modular units in a rigorous collage grammar.
JAMES GALLAGHER is a Brooklyn-based collage artist who reconstructs the human form from found books and ephemera to probe intimacy and identity. His work has shown internationally; he has curated exhibitions in New York, Berlin, and Cork, co-edited Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage, and appeared in outlets such as The New York Times and The Paris Review.
JOHN WATERS is an artist whose studio practice centers on photography, sculpture, and works on paper. He assembles grids of found images, studio photographs, and text to stage wry meditations on taste, desire, and the cultural afterlives of trash. His sculptures and altered books treat camp as material, reframing pulp ephemera and celebrity detritus with the precision of a collector and the bite of a satirist.
Y. MALIK JALAL (b. 1994, Georgia) is an artist and writer working across photography, sculpture, and installation to study place, memory, and Black life in the American South. He recombines found images, building materials, and archival fragments to map how histories persist in everyday landscapes.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ VISIT
Sweet Pea by Ryan Patrick Krueger at Fuller Rosen Gallery
This show explores queer modes of analog communication through printed ephemera and newspaper clippings. The works reimagine intimacy and memory as living archives, extending queer legacies into the present. The exhibition runs from November 7–December 14, 2025.
▼ READ
How Diane Keaton Moonlighted as a Photographer on Aperture
Photography was not a hobby for the New Hollywood star, but an important facet of her restlessly curious and creative life.
▼ LISTEN
Rooftops in the Centerfold by Will Lawrence
Will Lawrence writes folk songs that feel lived in. His new record, Rooftops in the Centerfold, carries the warmth of memories that aren’t too far away. It’s the kind of album that fits perfectly with morning light, something to play while you’re setting up the studio and getting ready to start the day.
