Marina Yermakova Timm (b. 1985) is a Russian-born LA-based collage artist. She creates original works on paper as well as designs for commercial projects. Observing and contemplating the collective human melodrama is what drives her to create. The exaltation and despair of our interconnected daily lives and the absurd banality of it all are her focus. An assemblage of arbitrary shapes, shades, and textures becomes a new complete whole. She chose collage as her preferred medium because it feels like an open-ended puzzle or a balancing of objects. The practice of bringing unrelated elements together to produce a cohesive piece helps to explore and understand complex human interactions. Marina’s main influences are the artists of the Russian avant-garde like K. Malevich and A. Rodchenko, as well as the Dadaist movement of post-WWI Europe. Their aesthetic and polar opposite views on what art is and should be have long been a source of fascination for her.