Amy Mintonye’s Fowl Play, which is currently on display in Lane’s Main Gallery. Collage and acrylic paint on paper.

There were so many options when it came to choosing an event to cover for this assignment. Almost too many, in fact, and I left the assignment sitting on the back burner of my mind until I realized it was due in only a few short days. As I walked about campus, nervously contemplating joining a circus instead of continuing my career as a college student, something caught my eye: a dominant male hand forcing a child’s head back while multiple birds regurgitated food into his mouth.

I guess you could say that is my kind of art.

As I looked around the gallery in building 10, I quickly began to fall in love with Amy Mintonye’s collages. They are extremely chaotic and vibrant, and remind me very much of Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python. Later on I found out that she would be conducting a lecture of sorts in the building 10 gallery on the 18th, so I decided then that I would use this assignment as an opportunity to find what this mysterious artist is all about.

The lecture itself was interesting enough, but at only a half hour it was surprisingly short. The folks in attendance were mostly from some sort of photojournalist class. The teacher of this class, who seemed like the one in charge of the event, really rushed things and didn’t give much time to talk with Amy about her work. I was disappointed to say the least, but managed to obtain some interesting information. Amy grew up on the East Coast, specifically Rochester, NY. As a child she said she loved playing with Legos and Lincoln Logs, for she enjoyed using building blocks to create things. I believe this is where her passion for collage came from. She mostly works with magazine clippings from the 150s-80s, searching stores like Portland’s SCRAP for old issues of Fortune and the like. She loves the mono color, classic feel of these images, and her works ends up being very powerful because she takes these images so far out of context.

Amy said she usually finds one specific image that gets a string emotional reaction from her, like the boy in Fowl Play, and builds a scene around it. Her current installment “The Rising Tide” is mostly focused on the effects of global climate change, this specifically rings true in Thin Ice, which depicts a group of people roller skating on the shard of a glacier.

Amy Mintonye’s Thin Ice

After the brief lecture, I took it upon myself to ask Amy more questions, which she was very happy to answer. She got her BFA at SUNY New Paltz, and currently resides in Portland. She has had multiple gallery installments in places like the Vancouver Public Library and Walter’s Art Center in Hillsboro. Though she would love to create art full time, she is an advertiser for the Pittock Mansion Museum in Portland. She said that she does very much enjoy doing this for a living, and that because it involves a lot of visual design she feels that her artistic skills played a key role in her getting hired on.

I found speaking with Amy Mintonye to be very inspiring, because she gets to do something she loves doing with her life and is being recognized for it. I hope that one day I will be lucky enough to get recognized for things that I love to do as well. Everyone should absolutely check her work out in the glass gallery in building 11, for it will b up until December 9th. For more information on Amy and her work, please go to amymintonye.com