HoBo

Barbara Miller and Holly Moe have teamed up to form HOBO, creating deep space collages that combine cut-paper architectural images with mylar and other highly reflective materials.

Barbara miller, owner and buyer for Laguna Gander retail store in Laguna Beach has degrees in science and education, she studied interior design and art at various institutions in the southwest and has years of experience as a designer of retail display.

Holly Moe, studio artist for over 25 years and former college instructor has works in the San Antonio Museum of Art and many private collections, including Frederick Weisman in Los Angeles and Trent Read in South Africa.  She owned and operated a gallery in San Antonio, Texas and has worked with various institutions as a curator.  She was awarded a Fellowship at the Pace Foundation in 1998.

The collages are exercises, attempts to break up the 2-dimensional picture plane using traditional linear perspective as revealed in architectural images.  Pieces of cut paper are combined with mylar and other highly reflective materials with ambiguous surfaces.  Landscape perspective provides deep space effects and expresses a relationship with nature as experienced through framing it with modern architecture.  Specific themes, ideas, or subjects are explored using images of cultural information to formally to show movement – falling – rolling –sliding – flying - leading the eye around the composition or evoking a time or place.   A car muffler, for example, becomes  a futuristic spacecraft. 

The collages are intended to stimulate memories, thoughts of fantastical places, and entertain by giving the glitzy mylars (symbolic of our hi-tech age) a context in which to be enjoyed.  The tension between slick futuristic artworks and the handmade physicality of these objects reflects the schism or delight we experience trying out a new camera phone while picnicking in some scenic wonderland.

We call ourselves HOBO because we work with simple (discarded) cut paper pieces from ads or magazine spreads, snips and scraps of iridescent ribbon or inexpensive wrapping paper.  We salvage and recycle from the plethora of mass media printed matter, gleaning out treasures – a bit of exciting architecture, a designer shoe, and to the consternation of some – famous artworks.  A Louise Nevelson assemblage becomes a monolithic, futuristic wall, a De Suvero steel sculpture blasts off for another world.  No one piece is the subject of any collage, each adds its own preciousness to the whole; re-elevated, re-presented in these “Deep Space Collages”.

HOBO’s studio is located on a palm tree ranch in Desert Hot Springs where Barbara and Holly work amidst the natural beauty of the desert.