Finding Joy - by Anika Toro (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Discover the magic of serendipity and artistic exploration in "Finding Joy"! This mixed media art book takes selections from nine different copies of the same book, showcasing Anika's transformative and playful approach to the original text. Each page spread uses hand-selected text, left unaltered from its original position. Through a process of erasure and blackout, Anika redacts everything except a newly found message, thought, idea, or poem, without adding any new text. Analog collages, paint, photography, embroidery, and more celebrate unique narratives, exploring creativity, spontaneity, and the profound moments that emerge from reimagining existing ideas. Above all, Anika believes that creating should be fun! She hopes this book is a testament to the delight in making and that in exploring this book, you too find a bit of inspiration on your own path to joy.

Review Quotes

"Anika Toro trips the light fantastic in her debut collection Finding Joy. But it's beyond dance or category--it's a journey to reclaim the narrative, a magick sleight of hand, agility lifting from each page. Using Eleanor Searle Whitney's An Invitation to Joy as the source text, Toro's re-vision is a call to wonderment, seeing through time and space and letters on lined paper. You can't pin down her creation, nor should you try. Just follow her artistry of collage, erasure, gouache, transparency, ink, photos, acrylic, image upon image. Fall upward into what's removed and reconstructed only to discover a waiting window, a clock's hands flying like birds. Let Toro's thoughtful, startling work unpin you from the confines of Time in our embattled world. Let her nimble footwork guide you back to hope and awe and mirth: Open the door and invite them in." --Linda Parsons, Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee, and Author of Valediction: Poems and Prose

"Finding Joy is a rich and moving description of what is known about joy, which is that it is fundamental to human flourishing and notoriously hard to define. In making art on the pursuit of this elusive emotion, Anika Toro has also taken up timeless questions that are as much about what can thwart and obstruct joy as they are about what can enhance and sustain it. Finding Joy coincides with the millennia-old endeavor of finding out what it is to be human." --Jessica Dore, Author of Tarot for Change

"What a treasure to see through my friend's eyes. Finding Joy is art for art's sake made from curated and scavenged bits of fun, wonder, and creative insight rolled into a visual circus. Anika has provided a road map to joy--and if you happen to have a physical road map still lying around, take this as a sign to jump around in this glorious inspiration and get out the paint and glue." --Hollie Chastain, Artist / Teacher, and Author of If You Can Cut You Can Collage

"Finding Joy is exactly that--the happiness you can feel in Anika's creative exploration makes me want to make stuff!" --Danielle Krysa, Artist, and Author of the Jealous Curator

About the Author

Anika Toro is a mixed media artist with a background in photography and collage. Her current work fuses narrative, serendipity, and playful experimentation into art that transforms familiar texts and images into unexpected expressions of creativity. Her innovative projects have found homes in hotels and private spaces around the world, while her award-winning photography has been seen in magazines, on record covers, and in exhibitions throughout the United States.