"Collage à Trois" Exhibition
109 gallery
This event has ended.
In the act of collage, many layers of recontextualization occur; from the source and its intended use, through the artist's manipulation and repurposing, to the ultimate perception of the viewer, the life of such a work undergoes many shifts and processes that bring with it a strange richness and a broad potential for meaning. Whether the elements were constructed digitally, or were found in book printed decades ago, whether they include found objects or the artist's own marks, the resultant works — playful, active, wistful, subversive — speak to today's media-saturated world, where we are constantly informed by contradictory and absurd imagery, and where more and more visual content resides in the public sphere.
For this show, we selected three artists who use collage as their preferred medium. Each artist was given her own wall in the gallery, and invited to created a larger assemblage of pieces on that wall. Together, the three walls constitute a larger collage, with relationships occurring between the various pieces that shed light on what it means to be working in the medium today.
Maj Anya DeBear uses a combination of religious, militant, and ethereal imagery to create works that are as enticing in their construction as they are perplexing in their implication. These elements are swirled together in non-hierarchal arrangements that hint at certain causalities and narratives, but include enough humor and contradiction to bely any simple read.
By contrast, Jaclyn Jurist's work tends towards distinctly flat surfaces, avoiding narrative and perspective with the sheer multitude of layers. The connections among this plethora of imagery are rendered almost moot through their own noisiness, forcing the subjects to then speak for themselves, demanding closer inspection. We pore through these images as detectives seeking clues in a suspect's messy home, or as if perusing the index of an old high school anatomy book. Zoom out, and the images take on an even, abstract construction.
Molly George, uses wide array of materials, from vintage envelopes to doilies, incorporating various artist's materials and paint, along with a number of books and magazines from the early 20th century. There is a strong sense of nostalgia and personal connection in these pieces, works that deal with divine and erotic love, with animal urges that jump off the wall, and yet always seem to retain a thoughtfully constructed, muted beauty.
Media
Schedule
from December 15, 2012 to December 30, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-12-15 from 19:00 to 22:00