Marisa

Bazan

Marisa Bazan

Marisa Bazan’s collages operate like emotional glitches, smooth, seductive surfaces ruptured by something unnerving and unresolved. She pulls from the visual excess of mid-century print culture, not to celebrate it, but to dissect its contradictions: the intimacy of performance, the violence of perfection, the absurdity of control. Her compositions are diaristic, mapping the blurry threshold between inner chaos and outward composure with a kind of surgical tenderness.

In the Words of the Artist

My collages challenge traditional notions of femininity by exploring a space where beauty and disgust can coexist. I'm drawn to unexpected contradictions, images and, ideas that hold multiple meanings at once. Making collages is deeply cathartic to me; it helps me express emotions I can’t always put into words.

Often, I don’t fully understand how I was feeling during a certain period of my life until I look back at the collages I made at the time. Sharing them can feel nerve-wracking, like posting a page from my diary, but that vulnerability is part of what makes the work meaningful to me.

I started collaging right after finishing my undergrad at San Francisco State, during a brief and miserable stint as a bank receptionist (a job I begrudgingly took just to make rent). Something about being immersed in that corporate and frigid environment ironically gave me the overwhelming feeling that I needed to create something, to spend my evening doing the opposite of how my day was spent. After work, I’d rush home to make art, and collage quickly became my medium of choice. It felt inevitable,

I’ve always been drawn to vintage imagery and old advertisements, specifically the Kodachrome film and the intensity of hyper-saturated color photos used in the 1950s - 1970s. I’m a sucker for a disgusting-looking jello mold accompanied by a plastic smile.

I think I’m drawn to a specific style and some recurring themes that naturally bleed through both my collage and photography work. In many ways, they feel separate though. Collage is what I turn to when I can’t quite express something through photography, and vice versa.

Each medium comes with its own limitations: with analog collage, I’m confined to what I can find in a magazine, while photography is bound to real life. Collage lets me explore more surreal or fantastical environments, whereas photography allows me to create images I haven’t yet found in a magazine.

​​A cup of chamomile tea and some music is a must, but the rest of my process is pure chaos. Paper everywhere, glue with the cap off, and half-baked ideas scattered across the table. I hate to admit it, but I’m pretty reckless when it comes to handling my materials. Just the other day, I found a cutout mouth under my couch while cleaning haha. If you look closely, you’ll probably find fingerprint smudges and choppy cuts in my collages. But honestly, I think that imperfection adds to the analog charm.

The vintage imagery I work with often reflects a time when the “tradwife” archetype was seen as the only acceptable path for women, a mindset that in many ways still lingers today. My subjects tend to sit in that tension between being sexualized and controlled versus feeling empowered and free. It’s a dynamic we start to internalize early, which is why children sometimes appear in my work.

I’m not interested in rescuing the original images but rather reimagining them, flipping the gaze to expose and exaggerate the hyper-masculine paradigms that once dictated their context. Some collages take a more serious tone, while others are tongue-in-cheek, playfully poking at expectations of how women “should” behave, but there's always a consistent thread exploring control, identity, and resistance.

About the Artist

Marisa Bazan is a Latina artist based in Brooklyn, NY, working in analog collage and film photography. Her work blends vintage imagery with personal narrative, often exploring themes of femininity, duality, and resistance. Marisa’s collage toolkit includes vintage magazines, a purple glue stick, scissors, an old scanner, and an X-acto knife–tools that reflect her hands-on, intuitive process.  

Website | Instagram