greg shegler.

Greg Shegler’s work is a tidal wave of kick-ass. Based in Toronto, he mixes vintage photos, found materials, pop culture kitsch, retro-Canadiana, childhood goodness, and rainbows into some of the best collage work I’ve ever seen. If you ever thought that Goombas, groundhogs, and Queen Elizabeth couldn’t fit into one work of art, you thought wrong. His stuff is so brilliantly random. Shegler describes his work as a “nostalgic tornado of awesomeness destined to conquer bare walls and sad faces wherever it goes.” Hells yes it is.

Everything he does is killer, but this first one is my favourite. Can you guess why? That’s right. Look to the upper right. Uh huh. That’s a mutha-fucking View-Master cartridge, ladies and gentlemen. How rad is that?

Battered and aged, his collages are like memory mash-ups. The bright, pristine shine of pixellated Super Mario pipes and Dorothy’s face seems so perfectly placed inside the frail, degrading backdrop of old photos from the 70s and 80s. It’s like a combination of perfect psychological memory laid on top of the fading material record of the exact same time. Preserved forever in thought yet destined, like all things, to have its materials slowly crumble away.