ODDITIES

Amela Cikota is an abstract artist that works with collages and paintings. Her work blends colors, plays with textures, and experiments with depth. Currently combining painting with collage, where she is inspired by nature and the hunt to find nontraditional materials. She is constantly searching for new materials to incorporate in the collages, especially items that have a technology embedded in them such as, player piano paper, computer punched tape and cards, voice recording tape, LED strips, stamps, and architectural floor plans that she created when she was in architecture school. The title of the series, Codes, nods to the lines and dots created by the designs in many of the technology papers. She combines these with more natural papers that have fibers and petals throughout creating the relationship between nature and technology on one surface, a connection to our daily lives.

Collage artist and painter, Amela Cikota, was born in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She lived in Germany before immigrating to St. Louis in 1997, where she eventually found her passion for art. She earned her BFA in Art Education with an emphasis in drawing at the University of Missouri – St. Louis in 2017. She has participated in art fairs, exhibited in over 25 different galleries, including international spaces in Milan and London, and has given several artists talks about her work. She currently works full time as a high school ceramics teacher, is a full time graduate student at the University of Central Missouri, assistant director and resident artist at the Soulard Art Gallery, and resident artist at Artisans in the Loop.