Tania Medina

“I see and acknowledge that the world is a grim place and there aren’t many big happy moments for everyone to celebrate, but that we individually can find the small happy moments in our personal lives.”

Interview

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Well to start, my name is Tania Medina, I’m 17 turning 18 this October of 2025, and this is my first year at Sierra College. I am studying to become a graphic designer, and after my two years here at Sierra, I want to continue my studies of graphic design at a 4 year art school in L.A., called Otis College of Art and Design. My hobbies consist of writing stories, drawing characters for my stories, painting, reading and watching anime.

How much experience do you have with collage?

Before this project, none.The closest thing I had ever gotten to a collage before was on Pinterest to use as my wallpapers for almost all my devices.And dont get me wrong I had heard of collages and I always thought they were really cool and just expressed this sense of freedom that normal pictures just didn’t have. I had also never really dabbled in actually making them and to be honest they never 100% piqued my interest until now.

Collage artists tend to be picky when it comes to their source material. Can you talk about your approach for selecting your images and/or publications?

I wasn’t that picky when it came to getting my material. If anything it was like finding gold when I found, not only the magazines but the images themselves. As to picking images I already had a word that I wanted to associate with a collage and I just flipped through every page looking for anything that was even remotely related to what that word was, and if I saw anything i put it in the word pile. Every pile of images had a word to it so if you had looked through each pile bore they were glued onto paper you would have had an idea of what you were looking at.

Were there any large themes you intended to explore or unpack before you began with this series of work? Did you stay on theme, or did things change as you began physically cutting and pasting images?

Honestly, no. When the prompt was posed about how you view the world, I had a pretty difficult time trying to visualize how I view the world, especially into 15 different things. So instead I decided to change the prompt a bit in my head and instead I focused on things I loved,  hated, feared and wondered about the world, and how I viewed those things that I loved and hated.

And as I mentioned before I just wrote a list of things. I compiled a list of words encompassing things  that I loved, hated, wondered, liked, everything, and even that was hard. I also feel like I had a vision of how I wanted each collage to look like with images that I had already made in my head, so I would say the theme changed in the way that they technically did not come out the exact way I wanted them to come out, but they still convey what I was attempting to envision.

How did your background and life experiences inform your collages?

All of my collages have something of which I have perceived or experienced within my life, in both the good and the bad. I won’t go into much detail as I find those experiences very personal to me, but I will say that they each reflect heavily on things I see in life; more good than bad I will point out.

What was your environment and set-up like when making the work? Did you listen to music? Did you work in isolation, or were you surrounded by distraction? Do you think this influenced the work you made?

I was very adamant about working in my room for most of this project, especially the gluing and combining images part. And when I had the chance I would bring a stack of magazines everywhere with me, and when I had time I was flipping through them and cutting out images that matched with my assigned word at the moment. I think If I had to name my biggest distraction, it would be the anime that I put on in the background while I was working. 

But I think I was smart about it as I picked really familiar ones that I had watched a few times already so I already knew the storyline so I didn’t have to pay attention as much. I also made sure they were in english so I could listen to them talk, which I think helped me stay awake as I worked late into the night. Speaking of which, I think the latest I stayed up was until 4 almost 5 in the morning on a school night, keeping in mind I wake up at 6:30 on school days. 

Overall I don’t think any of these things really influenced what I was working on as I just remember being so focused on my collages, that I barely paid attention to anything else, including the time.

Scissors or X-Acto?

I must preface this before I give my answer, but I think both scissors and X-Acto knifes each have their own uses for their own projects. But in reference to this project I preferred scissors more than X-acto knives. With scissors I felt as if I had more control in where I was cutting and I had more freedom with what shape I was cutting. I will say though I did have to take my time with a few pictures and with how much I was using the scissors my wrist did start cramping in the end.

Was there anything unexpected that emerged while creating your work? Any new epiphanies?

I will say that when I started working on my collages that I didn’t have a full list of my 15 words, so along the way when i was either gluing or cutting my scraps of paper, I just stopping everything I was doing to write down a new word that I had thought of, and I would scramble to write it down as fast as I could before I would forget it.

Looking at your work again, has your understanding of your collages changed over time? Has any hidden meaning emerged?

At first my collages were just a blend of the things that I liked or didn’t really like in the world, but after putting them together in a sequence, in reference to telling a story, I saw my collages in a different way. In putting them all together and not looking at them individually I saw that this whole collage essentially does encompass how I see the world. And what I mean by that is not in the way of what I like or dislike, but in the way of how I approach going through life and how I choose to see the world. I see and acknowledge that the world is a grim place and there aren’t many big happy moments for everyone to celebrate, but that we individually can find the small happy moments in our personal lives.