Collage/Assemblage

Juried by Regine Basha

Wall 1: Text-based Collage

Natalie Bradford / Celine Browning / Emily Shepard / Christopher Chaffin / Elizabeth Bennet / Gary Barton

The use of ‘Text’ in art – meaning the written word, the printed, stamped or typed word, typography, and the like – has been prevalent in some of the most experimental circles of recent art history from the early 20th Century until today, including historical examples in Cubism, Dadaism, Russian Constructivism, Surrealism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Depending on its form and

usage, it can either signal a striving towards intellectual, theoretical and/or immaterial concerns or alternately an anarchic breakdown of those same concerns. In quite the opposite vein, the use of collaged hand-written words often signals a highly personal or diaristic window into the artists’ process and perhaps even suggest subconscious thinking. While in other cases, the printed text in collage can convey a socio-political commentary on the mediascape itself - borrowing from newspapers, magazines, or propagandistic ephemera. For the Beat poets of the 1950s, cutting and collaging text from these sources became a process or portal through which the imagination opened to new ideas and visionary thinking. Present-day artists such as Charles Gaines, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Luis Camnitzer have singularly incorporated textual collage towards a critique of the authoritative word or canon.

The works brought together here on the first Wall tap into these varying histories in which textual collage informed conceptual ideas towards a final image.

Only memory in my brain, by Natalie Bradford, depicts the head of an anonymous male that is filled with textual collage –a mixture of typewritten words and handwritten words, amounting to slices of two lovers corresponding. Given the nostalgic nature of the black and white photo and the use of typewriter for the text, or the ease of cursive handwriting, one can only assume that this figure is in the past tense and the artist is deeply reflective of the lingering personal thoughts, memories, expressions of love and hope that remains. Celine Browning’s The Moon/The Moon (cover) falls into the singular category of ‘book arts’ for which there are many examples in recent art history, (most by notably by Brazilian artist Lygia Pape) The book, made up of collaged watercolor paintings, charts the cycles of the moon, along with diaristic text of the artist’s encounter with it. Emily Shepard’s Inside Out brings together painting and collage overlay onto a collection of antique encyclopedia pages. The pages of varying faded quality are either redacted or turned on their side and scribbled upon - rendering their original position as the voice of ‘authority’ and ‘truth’ not only obsolete but defaced with marks reminiscent of abstract expressionism insinuating the difference between the mind and body. Christopher Chaffin’s Everything Everywhere is a large tour de force collage aimed at simulating the crowded domain of the internet, which the artist has called ‘a chaotic carnival of humanity’s impulses’. Elizabeth Bennet’s I give thanks, conveys a series of gratitude statements the artist had written on twelve panels. Though the statements appear to be written, simply and succinctly, on a lined piece of notebook paper, they are actually not. Each element has been collaged; from the letters spelling out the words, to the blue lines, red lines and ‘holes’ of the paper. Gary Barton’s Personal Notes Reused, Re-organized and Redacted #29, may recall for the viewer the theories of ‘deconstruction’ of the French-Algerian philosopher, Jacques Derrida, which purports the constant analysis and re-working of philosophical texts as implicit to its meaning.

Wall 2 : Tactile Collage/Assemblage

Natasha Das / Lisa Cooperman / Karen Benton / Caroline MacMoran / Stella Hendricks / Wendy Kawabata / Anne Elliott / Suzanne Eller / Andrew Chalfen / Lannie Gannon

There are many elements that contribute to the history of assemblage, or that led to what was termed ‘assemblage’ since its advent in the early 1950s. The confluence of painting, sculpture, ready-made, mundane objects are often the typical characteristics of an assemblage work. In fact it was French painter, sculptor and printmaker, Jean Dubuffet who first coined the term ‘assemblage’ which has been adopted in the parlance of art history without translation into english. Dubuffet, also a proponent of ‘art brut’ was interested in demystifying art’s elitist status by utilizing mundane or everyday materials in his work. For him, the texture and tactility enabled a ‘child-like’, simplistic wonder to his work. Another undeniable key figure is Robert Rauschenberg who began with painting and printmaking collage and explored new terrain after he put the painting on the floor and called it a ‘combine’. What we now call ‘installation art’ is clearly an evolution of early assemblage. For contemporary artists today, the terms matter less than the sensorial effects of tactility and materiality. More and more we are seeing a mingling of hand-made, craft-inspired works, in some cases, alongside found objects. An emphasis on the laborious nature of the ‘hand-made’, seems to stand as a salve in stark contrast to the digital realms we have become so accustomed to living within. In recent contemporary art, the use of textile or fabric has seen a resurgence especially with overt tactile properties and textures in an assemblage manner. Here we have various examples with Natasha Das and her intimate embroidered abstractions such as In Tandem or Eri Silk 2 that connect with Jan Dubuffet’s ‘art brut’, or with Lisa Cooperman in her bold and densely packed mixed-media wall work Should. Woven Fragments by Karen Benton brings a tangle of recycled denim off the wall into more of a sculptural space underscoring ‘emotional encounters and interactions’. Caroline MacMoran delicately arranges found rope, vegetable netting and other elements that one would discard into a wall work, cheekily titled Do You Care? perhaps reminiscent of the artist Richard Tuttle who similarly used lightweight materials. For Stella Hendricks, using ‘kozo’ and mulberry paper in a collage of natural, organic forms pays homage to the generative growth of the seedpods of elm, maple and ash trees in An Answer of Embrace. In Incursion II and Detail, Rich Loam, Wendy Kawabata comes full circle and uses South Asian Kantha cloth in collage form to symbolically conjure the incursion of water level rise in South Asia where Kantha cloth is produced. A mixed-media collage work on rice paper by Anne Elliott called Starry Night Cerillos Hills depicts a tumultuous, perhaps apocalyptic climate scene with magic realist undertones. Suzanne Eller’s Squall, is formed of an elaborate assemblage with a multitude of found objects rendered into the form of a large sailboat teetering on the open seas. Artists also utilize hand-built assemblage of block forms and diagrammatic schema, offering an image of potentially visionary urban space, such as with Andrew Chalfen’s I Had That Dream Again, incorporating maps and architectural blueprints and Lannie Gannon’s Chef’s Hat or Duck Face, depicting dimensional spaces with colorful hand-cut paper collage and board.

Wall 3: Feminist Commentary

Rachel Thomas / Parker Reineker / Marion Holmes / Melissa Gamez / Sierra DeVuyst

Collage, Assemblage and photomontage has also been at the forefront of social-political critique and satire in art throughout the 20th and 21st Century. In this arena we will focus mainly on social critique from a feminist position bringing together in a group of works from photomontage, collage, assemblage of found objects, textiles and mixed media painting. Visual cues that show up in these works highlight a vast community of female artists from as far back as the German artist Hanna Hoch, to wry conceptual artist Martha Rosler who rose up in the 1970s and 1980s along with the iconic Barbara Kruger and then with British-Turkish artist Tracey Emin into the 1990s until today Significantly, in the past couple of decades we have seen a rise in the use of collage and assemblage amongst black female artists with such luminaries as Ellen Gallagher, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Deborah Roberts and installation artist Abigail DeVille. Culling from archival material, or media imagery, these artists often collage and overlay historical narratives onto the present day as forms of hommage, critique, or re-inscriptions of vital yet forgotten women’s stories. Often these works act as reminders of long-held racist positions that continue to oppress women of color.

Rachel Thomas’s University of Alabama (1965) and University of Louisville (1950s) highlights the very first black students to attend University (a predominantly white setting at the time), linking her own experiences in Higher Education to that of previous generations. Doctoring the vintage photos so that the black students are front and center, she highlights a moment in the not-so-distant past when black students were hardly present in these spaces, especially in the South. Parker Reinecker also revisits black history with Liberty and Crown + Scepter Club with archival imagery and photomontage narratives, considering the racial power struggles and class hierarchies that are so pronounced in these images. South African artist Marion Holmes creates mixed media/painting collages Soweto and Matriarchs, to honor Afro-centric memories of connections to place and community. The choice to render the faces anonymous leads one to wonder if this hints at the privacy needs over social media in protecting families and preventing exploitation, a contentious issue related to our current reality in digital spaces. Melissa Gamez creates a satirical photomontage series using elements from Ernst Heackel in “Oh darling how lovely, I have always wanted you to control” and “I just love packing up my autonomy and independence”. The series is intended as a critical response to the absurd overturning of Roe Vs. Wade and speaks to the ‘increasing attempted control over women’s reproductive rights. Sierra DeVuyst creates a collage of textile and quotational text to reflect that rise of misinformation, pseudoscience and myth propagated through the internet in past years and that may not be based in reality. Her use of canvas and paper scrap-collage to create topsy-turvy lettering emphasizes the hand-spun, somewhat unstable nature of these utterances.

Wall 4: The Everyday Object

Linda Popp / Danielle Jones / Suzanne Eller / Gina DeCagna / Jeannine Kitzhaber / Barry Beach / Gala Cude-Pacheco / Calliandra Bevers

‘The everyday object’ refers to material that appears in our daily environment be it domestic, utilitarian, or street refuse that would usually be considered waste. Basic utilitarian objects, such as clothing, furniture, eating implements, cleaning products, containers and so on would often appear in art installations with new attitudes that reflect the humble, mundane or overlooked. The most important factor for the purpose of everyday aesthetics, however, is not so much paying attention to an inventory of objects and activities but rather a shift in the attitude we have toward them. Within the history of art, ‘the everyday’ held appeal as early as in 17thC Dutch still life paintings for instance, which foregrounded more domesticated kitchen-table scenes, rather than keep them in the background. Of course another turning point came with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades which literally revolutionized the validation of mundane materials for art –one that influenced scores of artists since from Andy Warhol to Tom Sachs to today’s Nina Katchadourian amongst many others. Other strands of the conversations around ‘the everyday’ underscore a valuing of the forgotten, the downtrodden, the anti-institutional or anti-monumental position in and of itself which can be understood in the 1990s work of artists such as David Hammons and Gabriel Orozco for example. In a very different arena folk art and art by self-taught artists often explore the beauty and even sacredness of ‘everyday’ objects. Through these examples we learn that material ‘everyday’ culture gains meaning usually through a change of context or situation, or presented within a new frame or innovative juxtaposition. These strategies tend to propose an exciting blurring or frisson between art and life.

More recent justifications for present-day artists to use the everyday object has to do with the increasing awareness of excess waste our planet is carrying. Recycling and re-use have served forms of collage and assemblage in ways that propose adopting a life-long commitment to reduce waste in our environment. In this vein, we have several different examples and intentions here on Wall 4 for the use of found, reused everyday objects. In A Jumble of Small Things Priceless and Useless by Linda Popp, a jubilant collection of arbitrary found and personal objects form the basis of a campy boudoir. In the work of Danielle Jones, a collage titled Contents #8 is made with trash bags and is transformed into an aestheticized wall assemblage. The work of Suzanne Eller brings together everyday items into an assemblage aimed at representing a narrative on the climate crisis in The Great Unravelling. Utilizing stacks of deconstructed cardboard boxes to create architectural assemblages, Gina DeCagna builds spatial installations called Refrain from Suspense and Post-Structuralist Marketplace (Deptford High Street). Jeannine Kitzhaber constructs mini suburban planning schemas in a birds-eye-view with simple found objects in the work Bend, while Barry Beach constructs a free-standing sculpture out of reclaimed wood and box packaging called From the Accumulations Series. Both Gala Cude-Pacheco and Calliandra Bevers rely on a dramatic single object to convey a relationship with the everyday; with Cude-Pacheco the cuttings of a house plant is elevated to elegance with adhered rhinestones on its leaves, while in the comical work Baggage, Calliandra Bevers transforms a suitcase into an stitched and embroidered ‘open book’ citing lamentations she collected.

Wall 5 : Visionary (Psychedelia)

Craig Auge / Paget Fink / Kat Ryals / Jesse Katz / Brent Ridge / Peter Hassen / Karlyn Berg / Caroline Polich / Colleen Cunningham / Megan DeRoma / John Swanger / Eric Stein / Ashleigh Brown

Already, throughout history, Collage and Assemblage practices have fostered a tendency towards future-thinking or visionary images, exploring the sublime or even psychedelic realms. Mentioned before, the main example could be the work of Beat Poet Willaim S. Burroughs who aptly stated about cutting up newspapers for inspiration, “When you cut into the present the future leaks out” which refers to the cutting of printed text as a mode of divining future thoughts and hidden desires in the subconscious. Afro-futurism, evolving since the 1960s until today is another arena in which ephemera for music albums, posters, manifestos and the like utilized print and collage to extend into future-thinking, underscoring the ideation behind musical artists such as Sun Ra Arkestra for instance. In this section of Wall 5, the collage works are similiarly infused with an abundance of color and in many cases with an intentional repetition of forms or perspectival shifts that visualize a way to enter dimensional spaces. Whether this has been achieved through hand-cut collages or digital collages, the aspiration to create visually stimulating portals remains the same. The works assembled here represent various strains of this ‘visionary’ motif ranging from the craft-based, hand-cut abstractions that speak to a more geometric language such as with Craig Auge’s Keep the Lights on or Paget Fink’s densely packed digital collage, Parergon. In Kat Ryals’s In this world you’re a God the work is printed on velvet simulating the pattern of a crafted rug. Another set of works focus on more organic forms and motifs derived from the natural world or flora and fauna in works like Jesse Katz, Amber or Glow in the Dark or Brent Ridge’s Untitled (BR22-301), or Peter Hassen’s fantastical Anthropocene 3: Bees and Angel Hummingbird. Using watercolor along with mixed-media and repurposed packaging, Caroline Polich creates an abstract organic form that carries potential for both micro  and macro images - ranging from plant-forms to oil spills to internal organs - our eye sees what it wants to see. Karlyn Berg’s Six White Horses Come To Take You Home as well as Colleen Cunningham’s The Rain, as well as Megan DeRoma’s No Fun Once the Mouse is Dead, merge both geometric and organic forms to offer a new narrative about nature-visions beyond our imaginations. Then there are the dreamscapes or sublime scenes that aim to produce space beyond our conscious states reflected in the work of John Swanger with the hand-made Pink Eclipse and in the digital collages of Eric Stein’s Dreamworks #3. With Ashleigh Brown’s digital work of an Asian cityscape, we have the sense of a double or triple reality stacked upon itself as if to suggest a psychedelic existence of living in both the virtual and ‘the real’ world.