THE PRACTICE
Recycled Abstract is the evolving practice of R.Tucker, a Los Angeles/Long Beach-based mixed media artist working with repurposed magazines and found imagery across sculptural collage, painting, furniture, immersive installations and digital experimentation.
Polymath in hiding
I've always had a creative side, but early on I chose a career in finance, where I learned to look beneath the surface, recognize patterns, identify overlooked potential and understand how structure shapes possibility. Those instincts also guide Recycled Abstract. The Renaissance ideal I admired - an expansive mind, curious across disciplines and able to draw connections between seemingly unrelated worlds - has become a way of understanding my own practice.
A PERSONAL ARCHIVE
Magazines became contemporary manuscripts.
In small New York apartments, every object had to earn its space. The cultural and fashion magazines I collected were treated like art books, each holding something worth returning to. Reading about Renaissance humanists recovering forgotten manuscripts changed how I saw my own shelves. Those glossy pages held a record of what an era desired, celebrated and took for granted. What began as a collection became a personal archive.
REINVENTION
A kind of cultural archaeology.
I began building texture with recycled materials and “oops” paint. Eventually, that experimentation met the archive on my shelves. I started rolling, layering and reshaping magazine pages into sculptural collage. Fragments of images, words and color carried traces of their original context into new compositions. Recycled Abstract grew from that process of taking familiar material apart and discovering what it could become.
STRUCTURE AND IMAGINATION
One practice. Many forms.
Today, Recycled Abstract spans sculptural collage, painting, RARE Forms furniture, immersive installations and generative work. Across these forms, I return to questions of memory, perception and transformation: what we retain, what we overlook, and how meaning changes when familiar things are rearranged. The materials and tools keep expanding, along with the possibilities they open.