Paper media and glue
10 x 12 in.
Dara Cerv
Dara Cerv is a Brooklyn-based artist who treats collage as a meditative practice, using 20th-century source material to create new “communities” of images through unexpected connections. Drawing on dramatic natural events, dynamic human bodies, and blurred, uncanny interiors, her compositions aim to loosen stuck emotions and embrace a non-linear sense of becoming.
In the Words of the Artist
Paper media and glue
11.5 x 14.5 in.
I create collage in my home outside of my 40-hour work week. For me, collage is a meditative practice of uniting what seem like disparate images/items/effects, creating relationships where they did not exist, and seeking movement and energy between them. In conversation, these previously un-linked visuals draw out familiarities between one another and illuminate a new reality or community. In linkage, these things can no longer exist without each other.
Paper media and glue
8 x 11 in.
Collage is an anchor for the “artist” part of me that needs to engage in visual stimulation. It is the place I go to create connections and separations of texture, color, tone, and other energetic forms. It enlivens and comforts me to make something that frees up a stuck emotion or releases me from a rigid mental state. Like many things, it is a therapeutic act.
A theme that seems to come up for me is the weirdness of getting caught up in a non-linear mindset, or thinking of oneself as loaded with the experience of having lived but becoming new in every passing moment.
I try to read some poetry beforehand. During the process of making, I always put on some sort of outside-of-reality tv show in the background, something set in the future, or post-apocalyptic, or with superhuman or non-human characters, usually with snappy dialogue.
Paper media and glue
9 x 14 in.
Paper media and glue
8 x 8.
My stock of materials consists of books and magazines of many different kinds from the 20th century. I especially enjoy images of dramatic natural events, fabrics from the 80s, and strangely decorated interiors that look like they were photographed through a lens smeared with petroleum jelly. For the future, I can see (even more) collage for revolt/revolution.
Paper media and glue
12.25 x 12.5 in.
Paper media and glue
16.5 x 16.5 in.
About the Artist
Dara Cerv is a visual artist based in New York. Her work has appeared in both print and online journals. She has created cover and interior art under commission for the poetry collection Human Achievements by Lauren Hunter (Birds, LLC) and the academic textbook Producing Queer Youth:The Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment by Lauren S. Berliner (Routledge). Nikki Wallschlaeger selected an existing collage for the cover of Crawlspace, a poetry collection from Bloof Books. Dara’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at Site Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and Bushel in Delhi, NY.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
ALEXY TITARENKO (b. 1962, Leningrad/St. Petersburg) is a Russian-American photographer known for dreamlike black-and-white long exposures that render cities such as St. Petersburg, Havana, and New York as sites of memory and metaphor. Influenced by Dostoevsky and Shostakovich, his work moves from early political critique to a broader meditation on the human condition after the Soviet collapse.
MIQUEL PONCE (b. 1997, Spain) is an artist based in Torrent, Valencia. Working primarily in painting, he treats the image as residue and trace, shaped through time, chance, and material experimentation. He studied Fine Arts and Artistic Production at the Universitat Politècnica de València and has exhibited across Spain, including in Madrid and Valencia.
SIMON BENJAMIN is a Jamaican multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker based in New York, whose practice considers how the past ripples into the present in unexpected ways. Using the sea and coastal space as frameworks, his current body of work explores how lesser-known histories and colonial legacies impact on our present and contribute to an interconnected future.
LUKE CHISWELL is an Australian-born, Los Angeles-based artist working across painting, sculpture, and screenprinting. His work often uses everyday supports like skateboards and hotel stationery, treating wear, repetition, and touch as formal evidence of lived time.
RUBEN ESPARZA (b. 1962) is a Los Angeles–based Queer Latinx artist, designer, and curator. His practice engages Queer and Chicanx/Latinx histories through memory, materiality, and resistance, tracing the tensions of colonizer and colonized within his own genealogy.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ READ
Charles Gaines: Night/Crimes
A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles Gaines engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between objective and subjective realms. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he was on the faculty at CalArts for over thirty years.
▼ READ
Impulse Magazine review of Tom Burr: Journal Works
The Upstairs at Bortolami | 39 Walker St, New York, January 9 – February 28, 2026
▼ LISTEN
Fake Train by Unwound
This is a heavy album from 1993, full of angsty energy. Tense guitars lead the way on a shifty journey from this Pacific Northwest band, where the riffs feel tight, and the momentum keeps slipping into something darker and more hypnotic.
