Artist Statement "I Can Only Imagine": "After four and a half years of art school, I have gotten really good at cutting up paper and gluing it together. Each semester I took a variety of classes, learning numerous techniques using many mediums. Ultimately, I reverted to skills first learned in kindergarten, but what better to appeal to children than using a craft they have been familiar with since the age of four? Therefore collage, the art school word for cutting and gluing paper, seemed like the perfect medium for a series of images about life seen through the eyes of a child. One of the main inspirations for this series was drawn from a babysitting experience I had in high school. A friend and I were watching two young boys, Joshua and Michael, ages three and a half and five. Somehow we ended up playing a game of imaginary baseball in the living room for a solid hour. The ball we used was invisible, the bat was a stuffed rabbit, home plate was a pillow, and the rest of the bases were the arm chairs around the room. We took turns 'pitching' to the boys, deciding randomly when to tell them they got a hit or a home run, resulting in them running around the room at top speed until they reached the home pillow, laughing and out of breath. To the outside observer, it might have just looked like some kids running in circles, but as for what the boys saw, I can only imagine. This series is based on kids like Joshua and Michael playing games like imaginary baseball. It's based on an old picture of my little brother, sitting on a lawnmower at age five with a bucket on his head, an expression of complete seriousness on his face. It's about the worlds created by children that may seem inane and incomprehensible to anyone over the age of ten, but are as real to their creators as any adult's next mortgage payment." -Kim Allen