Surreal Collage Portraits Offer a Look Into the Mind’s Eye of People From the Past

Creating a collage allows an artist to recontextualize something—to give it new meaning beyond its original intent. Artist Shane Wheatcroft blends and rearranges vintage advertisements and editorial spreads into new and often more mysterious meanings. Some of his most striking pieces fuse portraiture with seemingly disparate symbols of interior spaces, home goods, and beyond. The results are an alluring combination of the past from a contemporary point of view, remixed with surrealism in mind.

Wheatcroft’s collages offer a look inside the psyche of the people he portrays. In many of these images, the hair and attire of the person are kept intact; it’s the facial features that have been replaced by the imagery of someone turning on a television or waiting to serve a cup of tea. Each set of cutouts is different, but there is a constant throughout. One eye of the person he’s depicting always remains, telling the viewer that we’re looking into the mind’s eye of the character.

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