Tina Tona is exploring her dual heritage through pop culture and collage

Drawn to the technique through a love for its “resourcefulness and tactility”, Tina Tona first started making collages in 2014, after reading a Dan Eldon book that her sister had passed on to her. There was something about the nostalgia of the British photojournalist and artist’s style that resonated with her as a teenager, and has pretty much stuck ever since: “I loved that his subjects were his friends and all the colours and playfulness almost reflected the way he admired them,” she tells It’s Nice That.

Tina’s vibrant mixed media collages and photo illustrations have now become her main artistic pursuit. Aside from Dan Eldon, the artist’s careful compositions of her puzzle pieces of newspaper, magazines, felt yard and beads, also take influence from music videos from the early 2000s. “I always find myself returning to B.O.B. by OutKast because of the afro-futuristic colour treatment [...] Hype Williams’ work was also very pivotal to me growing up. My north star since I was a kid has always been music videos,” she says.

Seeing the “reconstruction of imagery as a positive world-building tool”, Tina takes from her experiences, growing up in between Uganda, Rwanda, Canada and the US to explore “the richness of diasporic Black expression, queerness, beauty and radical joy”. In her multilayered, textural pieces the artist likes to spotlight subjects that remind her of the people that she’s inspired by in real life, “like my parents, my siblings, my cousins, my closest friends, and my mentors”, she explains. To do this, she often turns to an array of “vintage Black magazines” as the main material for her compositions, seeing the use of these archival visuals as a way to navigate her heritage through pop culture. “Black heroes in sports, music, and film are a recurring theme in my work,” she says. “I love the idea that I can alchemise something seen as ‘low-brow’ and give it some validity and dignity.”

The artist likes to describe her joyful cut-and-paste style as “organised noise — because no matter how chaotic it might look, there’s a meaningful interaction between all of the materials and subjects I use”, she says. “Making my work as playful as possible is crucial to my practice and my perspective on art.”