/Bio

Stephen Knezovich is a collage artist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He’s been obscuring faces & obstructing landscapes since 2009.

/Statement

Collage reclaims a small part of my pre-internet brain. The process forces me offline and to slow down and look–really look–at the materials at my disposal, shrinking the world of possibilities and giving me control over the chaos.

I’m drawn to the immediacy and tactile nature of collage, to the way it allows the past to be recycled, reinterpreted, and reprocessed into something new. My work often features obscured faces and obstructed landscapes found in discarded American mass market news and lifestyle magazines from the pre-1960s. My goal is to render the familiar anonymous and to uncover a beautiful new strangeness.

I believe that analog cut-and-paste collage is a way of both seeing and experiencing the world. It is simultaneously a response to the limits (and possibilities) of an inescapable consumer culture and a deep desire to destroy and to create.

Collage is also a place to redirect personal anxieties, to exercise control over an ever-accelerating world, and to brush back the overwhelming digital crush of apps and push notifications, social media rants and news cycle churn, the relentless wanting of advertisers and influencers, and the never ending stream of image and video.

The ritual of stripping images down to their simplest forms and then building them back up again is calming ... cathartic even.

For me, collage is mental health.

- SK

/Editorial Illustrations

2019 CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART’S STORYBOARD / Issue #2: Infinite Lives
2016 ESQUIRE (Russian Edition) / July Issue
2016 WONDERLAND / Short Stories by Samuel Ligon
2014 BREVITY / Fall Issue
2013 SATELLITE MAGAZINE / Issue #3
2013 CREATIVE NONFICTION / Issue #47

/Exhibitions

SOLO

2017 ROYAL / Pittsburgh, PA
2014 MYM ARTSPACE & COFFEEHOUSE / Pittsburgh, PA

GROUP

2022 MARTHA GAULT GALLERY / AAP Showcase / Slippery Rock, PA
2016 FUTURE TENANT / New Order / Pittsburgh, PA
2014 GALLERY 4 / Salon Show / Pittsburgh, PA
2014 MINE FACTORY / Drawing.Paper / Pittsburgh, PA
2014 937 GALLERY / AAP Showcase / Pittsburgh, PA
2013 FRAMEHOUSE / AAP Showcase / Pittsburgh, PA
2012 MODERN FORMATIONS / Winter in Frames / Pittsburgh, PA

/PRESENTATIONS

2020 GUEST LECTURER Visual Thinking / University of Pittsburgh

/Distinctions

2017 FLIGHT SCHOOL FELLOW Creative Capital, Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

/Education

2007 EASTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY // MFA Creative Writing // Spokane, WA
2004 UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA // BA English // Orlando, FL