Troy-based collage artist Niki Haynes’s latest piece, Parts Per Million, invokes an automotive cloud with the hypnotic, swirling movement of a flock of starlings, called a murmuration.
Parts Per Million belongs to her “Culture Consumed” series, which is the culmination of a body of work spanning 15 years. Haynes aims for each piece to stand alone but ultimately resonate together to identify and acknowledge our collective consumption and all it entails, encouraging us to stand back and absorb the big picture, adjust, and reapproach.
It also makes a visual representation or “semantic code” for the scientific term of parts per million (PPM) used to measure contaminants in the environment, generally invisible to the eye and easily ignored. “Even though that ’64 Chevy may not be on the road anymore, the molecules of its exhaust, tire particles, and deteriorating parts are still all around us, polluting our air, water, and ground,” Haynes says.
The concept of the series began to form for Haynes in the spring of 2020 when fewer cars on the road resulted in noticeably cleaner air.
Using a completely analog process, Haynes gleans imagery from materials such as magazines, newspapers, and books. She organizes, files, and cuts out images with scissors or an X-Acto knife. To reach a final version, she uses a chromatic wheel to ease the eye into accepting an otherwise overwhelming amount of visual information.
“As I work, I subtract some images and add others whose qualities and dynamism are needed to achieve the murmurating effect and to make it ‘sing’—the positive and negative spaces have become harmonic so this means the piece is finished,” Haynes says.
“You have to work backwards, upside down, and inside out, which can feel like a dyslexic nightmare. All of the puzzle pieces need to return to their proper place for it to hum again,” she adds.
Inspired by her mother, Ellen Haynes, and her Pratt Institute mates Nancy Grossman and Anita Siegel, whose prolific collage work was featured in the New York Times during the 1960s and ’70s, Haynes also takes cues from Warhol’s ’60s Pop Art.
But it’s the swirling hum of the murmuration concept that she finds herself returning to most. “I make work that deals with sometimes heavy subject matter. I hope to engage the viewer to see human behavior and culture in a light they hadn’t considered before or may want to ignore,” Haynes says. “I attempt to touch on the elusive and strive to create work that may be simultaneously delightful, potent, jarring, beautiful, intriguing, and hopefully relevant.”
“If the work succeeds on any of those levels, I am happy, but if its appeal is as a pretty picture, or a hit of nostalgia, that’s okay too. I’m confident the deeper meanings will still register somewhere in the viewer’s psyche,” Haynes says.
This article appears in August 2024.
