During our visit to the WSU Art Museum Collection Study Center, we were exposed to a small handful of different artists from the pacific north-west region. I enjoyed looking all of the work of all of these artist’s, but one artist that stood out to me in particular, was Mita Mahato. I was most drawn to her work because of her choices when it comes to laying out ideas onto a page.

Panels 6-13 of Unidentified Fluid Object by Mita Mahato.

The first example that initially got me interested in her work, was from a story told across 19 different pages, yet only half of the page is used on most of them. Her artistic flare as an artist is rather than drawing these ideas and pictures out onto paper, she chooses to actually cut and paste in this ideas using other smaller pieces of paper. I found this extremely interesting to look at because of how you can see the different layers underneath each panel. This take on creating a comic/story was probably rather challenging for her, not only because of the amount of extra time that had to be spent on cutting, but making sure her “cut-out” materials had smooth edges and that the different materials of the paper work well together with each other.

Page 3 from Sea, a zine created by Mita Mahato.

Moving over to the other table with all the smaller Zines on them, I continued looking for Mahato’s work. I found two Zines that were created by her, and one of them was very interesting to me. Different than the materials on the large table in the center of the museum, the Zine’s were not the original artwork, but reprints of what artists had created. When I was flipping through Mahato’s Zines, the strategy of cutting and pasting objects onto a blank medium still worked very well, even when scanned, reprinted, and flattened. Considering Mahato uses images and illustrations to portray her stories instead of words, I found it fun to read through her Zines because it leaves a small amount of the interpretation up to the reader. Overall I really enjoyed this visit to the old Art Museum Collection, and I found all of the artists to have varying and interesting methods for telling a story.