Bleeding Heart Collage
"President Tourist"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2' x 3'

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Lions and Tigers and Bears"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2' x 3'

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Cyclone"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2' x 3'

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Hudson River Road Trip"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2' x 3'

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Internet Dating"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Discovering the Light Bulb"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Cowboys and Indians"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Out of Controlled Burning"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

Bleeding Heart Collage
"On the Spiral Off Ramp"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3

Bleeding Heart Collage
"Flying, Falling, Sucking, Bleeding"
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2' x 3'

The Bleeding Heart Collages began as little more than an exercise in the visual organization of aesthetic and political ideas. They were born out of a personal and seemingly collective low moment of ideological morale in the winter of 2001, and served as a kind of creative calisthenics, an activity whose main intent was merely to get the creative juices flowing into a positive art process with ambitions of further related works to follow.
They were originally created with antiquated public presentation paper called The Lecture Pad. This was typical cheap, blue lined paper used in the classroom or office meetings, large and propped on an easel and scribbled on, somewhat spontaneously, with a large magic marker, short phrases, key words, or other visual aids. Each page was cast aside quickly in order to better illustrate a new idea on a clean sheet. They were disposable and used for immediate performance. These were the initial guide lines in making the collages that would be called the The Lecture Pad Series, which were properly presented shortly thereafter in a performance for a small gathering in Chelsea, NY in the home of Louise Bourgeois.
This flippant production and performance served as a meditative and cathartic activity for the artist while creating a heated controversy over the ideals and values, political and/or artistic, of the immediate audience, finally prompting Louise Bourgeois to say, "This boy is interesting." The success of the performance inspired a second movement of collages, this time on higher stock and quality paper, thus giving further release and visual order to the confluence of emotions and ideas that most of the world was confronted with during this time. This was the birth of the Bleeding Heart Project.
From excerpts of his original essay entitled, "The Lecture Pad Series" Kauppi recognized the collages as containing "the reticent tone of the found object, while differing from ready-mades, collage as still-life. The observable passage of time becomes heightened as images from the past are realigned with landmarks in the present. How this displacement parallels the construction of collage is uncanny." Kauppi goes on to highlight the significance of the magazine and newspaper clippings, their "obsequious visual ephemerality," seemingly in attempt to immortalize their otherwise disposable quality, a common reaction at this time for those determined to "never forget." He says, "Consider the amount of energy expended in the daily production of a newspaper, an astoundingly complex and efficient creative genesis exhibited immediately to a massive international audience, only to be discarded within minutes or hours of being observed. The photographs submitted to the editor to be chosen for the cover page must be overwhelming in number as well as inundated quality. They are placed in a precarious station of accomplishment and social value within record time. This invariable daily combustion seems to best represent our own human mortality."
Kauppi concludes his statement with what will become part of the greater Bleeding Heart Concept. "In the dusty attic of my definitive spirituality an infinite hole is noticed again as an old tear is seen in a neglected canvas when it is taken out of the rack and light shines through it. In this moment of disillusion, I feel the floor drop out and the walls dematerialize showing that cornerless space where foggy convections and endless oscillations pass perfectly through a void mapped only in an all too suggestive geometric scaffolding, where words are too vague for a respectfully enigmatic description. Image without subscript becomes fetish, foreign relic. Phrases without context become religious, poetic. I am met with the same terrible conclusion: Life is long. (and maddeningly repetitive).
The Bleeding Heart Collages are pictures of the ensuing struggle against the collapse of a once logical and accepted perspective into a spiralling groundless abstraction, which somehow, sometimes, miraculously comes to make more sense than what stood previous.

"Burning Bush Environmentalist" from the Lecture Pad Series
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

"Hope Springs Eternal" from the Lecture Pad Series
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

"Turkey" from the Lecture Pad Series
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

"Machine Gun" from the Lecture Pad Series
Acrylic and Collage on Paper

"Israeli Robot Arm" from the Lecture Pad Series
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

"Space" from the Lecture Pad Series
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'

"Crazy Bald Head" from the Lecture Pad Series
Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 2.5' x 3'