Deana Novak, 42, is a self-taught artist from Williston. Her collage-based show, “Cut and Paste,” will be at the Tumbleweed Gallery from Oct. 15-Nov. 8.

A surreal art exhibition titled “Cut and Paste” from self-taught Williston artist Deana Novak is celebrating whimsy and strangeness in a dreamlike way at the Tumbleweed Gallery from Oct. 15-Nov. 8.

“I’m all about pushing the boundaries and trying new things, and that’s kind of what ‘Cut and Paste’ is about. It’s a lot of different things, but it still comes together as a very cohesive show,” Novak said.

An open house for the solo exhibition is being held on Wednesday, Oct. 23, from 1-5 p.m. by gallery owner Marilyn Niewoehner at the Tumbleweed Gallery. Novak will be joining virtually throughout the event.

The works in the exhibition are collage based, utilizing images from vintage periodicals that Novak has collected.

“I fell in love with collage during the COVID years. I primarily was watercolor, gouache illustration, pen and ink type of stuff before that. I love to try everything. I love to explore everything,” Novak said. “My art, to me, is a form of therapy.”

Novak first discovered her fascination with vintage periodicals and magazines when she was at her grandma’s house clearing out some old bookcases.

“I found a set of old ’70s home decor books. I just got extremely inspired by those and the images in those older publications are so amazing,” Novak said.

“It was such an artistic time in the ’70s. All the advertising and the photos they did for these books were so amazing. It’s kind of a lost art now because we’ve moved away from print materials so much,” she said.

Novak then began collecting vintage periodicals in earnest, with a love for ’50s periodicals onwards. Novak has even been gifted a few periodicals from the 1940s she absolutely adores.

“I think the advertising, the photographs, the illustrations and ads were an art form back then. I love taking those little snapshots in time and creating something new and interesting with them,” she said.

All of the images Novak uses in her collage are from actual, vintage periodicals. Nothing is printed off.

“I snip them with my scissors and make them into something completely new and different,” she said. “‘Cut and Paste’ is a lot of my experimentation with collage. It’s a lot of surrealism, a lot of exploring different vintage images.”

Image making magic

The surrealism art movement plays a large role in Novak’s inspiration and approach to creative image making overall.

“One of the most famous surrealist collage artists was Hannah Hoch. She was a German female collage artist in a time where it wasn’t very common for female artists to get a lot of mention,” Novak said. “She was part of the surrealist movement with all the men, which was really impressive. She was super inspiring.”

The surreal art movement has also inspired Novak to create her very own game while creating pieces.

“Surrealists are very big into art games, for lack of a better word. They have a lot of different exercises that encourage you to explore your creativity,” Novak said. “I do a game called ‘collage roulette,’ where I open a magazine and I pull out five or six random pages. Then I force myself to select an image from each page and create something new with those images.”

Novak enjoys giving herself constraints on her work so she can find creative ways to navigate the materials before her.

“It’s something I’ve been exploring a lot lately. ‘What can I do with just this? How can my brain transform it into something different and new from what I have?’ I think collage really promotes that idea,” she said.

For Novak, being willing to explore different modes of creating and different mediums is important to her growth as an artist and person.

“I’m always willing to jump in feet first and try something. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes I find something new that I really love and gravitate towards,” she said.

“I wouldn’t have found my love of collage if I hadn’t been open to trying something new and learning,” she said. “I think always learning is super important.”

Novak’s collages tend to embrace whimsy and playfulness but sometimes explore darker themes and messages as well.

“I’m not an artist that likes to project my statements on others. I want the viewers to take away what they see from it,” she said. “I want it to have at least created some sort of feeling in you, whether that’s good, bad, indifferent, whatever, it sent a message to you and that’s what I think art should do.”

One of the pieces in the show is titled “Sweet Revenge,” a collage piece illustrating a chicken holding a rifle and hunting Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The piece started with the chicken and ended with Novak paging through her stash of periodicals to find the Colonel Sanders image she knew she had seen in one of her travel magazines from the ’70s.

“It was like a treasure hunt,” she said. “It was perfect but sometimes it doesn’t always work that way.”

The Cut and Paste exhibition is also showcasing a number of pieces from the Fembot series Novak has created.

“I made a bunch of really beautiful papers and then started making these strange characters from a 1954 Sears and Roebuck catalog, creating these weird, strange little ’50s-style-looking robots and adding them to this beautiful hand-dyed paper,” Novak said of the fembots.

The method Novak used to dye the papers was a Japanese paper marbling technique known as suminagashi, or “floating ink.”

“You float ink on top of water, and then you put your paper on there, and it pulls the ink up off the water in these beautiful concentric ring-type designs. Or you can change it up and make it very marbly,” Novak said.

Gratitude

Novak also teaches art classes for children at the James Memorial Art Center in Williston. “I always want to know new things that I can teach to the students and make sure that they’re trying lots of different things, too,” she said.

Novak was inspired by her high school art teacher, Donna Jones, to push the boundaries of her creativity and make art to express herself, something she hopes to bring to her own art students.

“She was the most encouraging art teacher in the world, even when my art was a little strange and weird as a teenager, she was just like, ‘Do it. Keep going. Keep doing it,'” Novak said.

Being a woman artist with her own solo surrealist shows has meant a lot to Novak.

“Back in the Surrealism days, it was very hard for a female artist to get a show, and usually if she did have a show, it would have to be a show in conjunction with male artists, like a group show or something like that,” Novak said.

“There were lots of female artists back then, but they just weren’t noted. They didn’t have a venue to share their work,” she said. “All these female artists paved the way for us to be able to share our artwork and have it out there.”

Novak credits much of this increased visibility of women artists to the dawn of the internet and social media. “It’s amazing when I can find so many awesome female artists and connect with them, and we do art trades and form bonds that way,” she said.

Novak also values the various galleries across North Dakota that are willing to show the works of local artists of any gender and background.

“I’m always so grateful to all the gallery spaces that share my work,” she said. “I love the fact that these galleries, especially North Dakota galleries, are so supportive of all of the amazing talent we have in North Dakota. You can walk into any gallery in North Dakota and see amazing artwork.”

Novak is also a textile artist and runs her own longarm quilting business in Williston for her day job.

“People bring me their completed quilt tops, and then I sandwich the top with the batting and the backing, and then I have the giant sewing machine that does all the fancy stitching that you see when you look at a quilt,” Novak said. “It’s a computerized machine, and it can do all kinds of fancy stitching.”

Novak currently lives in Williston with her husband, Aaron, her 12-year-old daughter, Avinell, and their dog, a German shorthaired pointer named Thora.