Album 1, Clea Christakos-Gee
On a dark background, many found image fragments are layered into a dynamic composition. Plastic photo album sleeves are layered between the imagery. Many of the images are cut in organic and rounded shapes. There is a yellow image that resembles a glass form at the center of the composition. There are also images of locks, hair combs, a coin, a bubble, and an eye.
Title: Album 1
Artist: Clea Christakos-Gee
Date: 2025
Medium/Materials: Photo collage on transparent film
Dimensions: 76.2 cm x 114.3 cm
Form/Genre: Collage
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Psychosis; Layering; Identity; Patient experience
Artist Statement:
Clea Christakos-Gee’s practice embraces the material elements of photography to create intimate and diaristic images. Her work takes form on paper including collage, artist books, and installation. She cuts, collects, and composes found images. The process is reflective and tactile, a counter to the rapid pace of digital circulation.
Christakos-Gee thinks through context and containment, transparent materials such as plastic sleeves and acrylic sheets become locations for images to float and overlap. Her work uses collage as both a medium and methodology to think about how images circulate, break down, and carry meaning.
She reckons with the tactility of photography in the digital era by leaning towards material practices and printed matter. Christakos-Gee considers how photographs can be revealed or obscured, and how these gestures can become expressive. Her practice fits the theme of health and wellbeing through my material explorations and lived experience with mental illness.
Her collage practice took on new significance after her first hospitalization for psychosis. Working with fragments became a way of thinking through the residue of the experience. The medium of collage offers a way to translate the fragmentation of perception, image, and ego into physical form.
Christakos-Gee is careful not to romanticize the experience of psychosis, she chooses to remain with questions of perception and construction. Collage offers a structure that feels honest to the experience of psychosis because it permits free association and nonlinear assembly. Collage allows her to work inside disorientation, to shape from it rather than resolve it.
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
This work is a response to Christakos-Gee’s lived experiences and hospitalizations for psychosis and bipolar disorder I.
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.
Learn More:
Instagram: @cleacg