The collages in this collection invite viewers to enter a fantastical world, one inhabited by foxes in red regalia, birds with human heads and beastly heads with
human appendages, frightened faces and serene ones, wise dogs and cunning cats, and the powerful stares of disembodied eyes. It is the realm of Becca Smith’s imagination, one she drew on to create the strange and beautiful works her admirers have assembled herein.

From early adulthood, when Becca began making homemade books combining picture cutouts and typed poetry, she worked intuitively, gathering the various elements in her compositions as they struck a nerve or prompted some vision from her subconscious. Later, after surviving breast cancer, she went further, exploring the depths of her dreams and waking reality. (Many collages included here illustrated her 2005 book, “The Art of Surrender.”) She produced some frightening tableaux – menacing doctors, severed limbs, eerie skeletons – but also whimsical ones – peas shooting out of what looks like a phallus or a giant squirrel leering while a man and a woman engage in an apparently intimate act. And everywhere: birds and feathers, butterflies and flowers, bees and bones.

To the casual observer’s question of “What does it mean?” Becca often responded with a smile and a shrug. “I don’t know, really,” she’d say, looking up from the drafting table in her studio, her glasses straddling the tip of her nose.
Surrounded by piles of cut-paper objects and images that formed a kind of castle around her, she would admit that these colorful compositions sprang from her exploration of her innermost self, something she, as an artist, understood was her duty. Although she did discuss her work occasionally in public (including talks at a local performing arts center and at cancer survivors’ seminars), for the most part she let the pieces speak for themselves.