After 46 years, I am still trying to exhaust the possibilities of collage. Every time I think I’ve come to a natural ending, I hear a “wait, wait, there’s more,” like in an infomercial, and I’m off again, intrigued by the grand puzzle that cut paper and paint present to me.

Willem de Kooning famously said “flesh is the reason why oil paint was invented.” I’ll add that collage was invented to fill in where oil paint leaves off. Custom cut-outs draped over painted figures reveal double and triple entendres. Clipped photos of water tanks, jewelry, chains, mufflers, panty hose, and ad infinitum work overtime at creating meaning. I use these symbol rich print extractions to animate allegorical paintings, remixing found imagery and invented archetypes with art historical genres to probe the mystery of what makes an identity endure. Suspects from my archive of images, fossilized in glue, document a second history by capturing the always shifting visual interests of mass media. Hovering over it all, like a big tent revival, is my ceaseless enchantment with humans and the theater of the everyday.

For the majority of her artistic career, Mary Lou Zelazny has been devoted to the synthesis of painting and collage. The history of her dedication runs deeper still, starting in childhood as she observed her grandmother scrupulously accumulate and reconfigure cast-off objects, pictures and paper cuttings. Zelazny's subjects are many and shifting: dreamscapes, illusions, myths, figures, tools, vessels, trees, flowers and fabric appear and reappear throughout her works. In some, pictures are flooded with images of things; paint-ensnared photographs testifying to the absurdity of modern life. In others, abstract décalcomanie collage materializes what is typically unseen or inaccessible; energy channels within tree boughs or nerve substrates under skin. After four decades, Zelazny’s techniques, in concert with her subjects, continue to invent and evolve.

Mary Lou Zelazny earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1980. After a decade of continuous art production and exhibition, Zelazny was recruited to join the faculty of the SAIC as a visiting artist in 1990. She has taught as an adjunct professor in the Department of Painting and Drawing since 1995 and was granted adjunct full professorship in 2005. Throughout her teaching career, Zelazny has taught and lectured both nationally and abroad.

Zelazny’s work has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Szczecin in Poland among others. Zelazny has participated in residencies at the Kunstmeile Krems in Austria and Dorland Mountain Colony. She was awarded grants from the Santo Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, Margaret Klimek Phillips Fellowship, Arts Midwest and The National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the City of Chicago, Elmhurst College, Elmhurst Art Museum, Kohler Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, McCormick Place and Rockford Art Museum.