Pennsylvania-based mixed media artist and designer Christina Galbiati cuts, tears and overlaps individual Helvetica letters into dense xerographic collages on board, building compositions from mundane expressions like “Blah,” “Ugh” and “Hmm” to explore sensory overload, capitalism and the irreplaceable value of the human hand.
Christina Galbiati could do this digitally. She is a seasoned design professional with the tools and fluency to collage the entire series in Photoshop. She does not. Every piece in Fragments and Feelings is constructed by hand: letters typeset at 12pt, printed out, run through a black-and-white xerox machine — an older model, with its own imperfections — hundreds of times, until layered textures emerge from repetition, accumulation and the happenstance of an aging machine. The process is deliberate.
“I believe tactile art is more important than ever,” she says, “especially as AI and intangible digital work is increasingly pervasive at this moment.”
The works are built from the most banal material: everyday expressions of noise and overwhelm. “Blah,” “Ugh,” “Hmm,” “SOS.” Individual letters are cut and torn from coloured paper and xerographic sheets, then collaged onto board in dense layered patterns. The sans-serif Helvetica, loaded with its own associations of modernism, corporate neutrality and capitalist infatuation, becomes the raw material for compositions that critique the same culture that canonised it. The black-dominant colour palette, consistent across the series, pays homage to newspapers, ephemera and tangible media. The constructivist and Dada references are worn consciously, drawing a direct line between the experimental conditions of those historical design periods and today’s 24-hour news and social media cycles.
Each piece is an original analog collage — not a giclee, not a digital print. Blah La Ugh (400) contains approximately four hundred individual letters. The ear in several compositions is a handmade graphite sketch photocopied onto paper. The scale ranges from intimate to commanding: from 6 by 6 inches to 18 by 24 inches, all mounted on 1.5-inch board. The series began in autumn 2025 and continues.
Christina Galbiati teaches at Moravian University and Penn State Lehigh Valley, where she received a Teaching Excellence Award for adjunct faculty. She holds an MFA from Marywood University and maintains an active studio practice in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Website: TinaGalbiati.com Instagram: @TGalbiati
Fragments and Feelings, 2025 to present. Mixed media: analog collage of xerographic paper on board. Works include: Blah La Ugh (11 × 14 in, 2025), Blah La Ugh 400 (18 × 24 in, 2026), Hmm (6 × 12 in, 2026), SOS (6 × 6 in, 2026), UGH Information Overload triptych (8 × 8 in each, 2025).
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