haphazard presents a group show titled “This is Collage” and invites you to an opening reception on July 9th of 2016. The group show featuring a wide range of artists will run from July 9th through August 6th.
What collage achieves, then, is a metalanguage of the visual. It can talk about space without employing it; it can figure the figure through the constant superimposition of grounds; it can speak in terms of light and shade through the subterfuge of a written text […] As a system, collage inaugurates a play of differences which is both about and sustained by an absent origin.
Rosalind Krauss, ‘In the Name of Picasso’ (1981)
Many view collage as the foundation of 20th century modern art because it is associated closely with the monumental art movements of that time from Braque and Picasso to Max Ernst and Jacques Villeglé. From its humble beginning of primarily two dimensional cut and paste to later literary and filmic practices, collage is vital and relevance still. Originated in Europe the technique to “coller” or to glue as an artistic production or assemblage is now more than 100 years old. One of the aims in this group show is to present new works of the collage from within its traditional framework, associated deep roots in political and cultural commentary to humor, into the new setting of the 21st century.
With modern cinema and advertising both in print and in motion, our culture has come to accept jump cutting and juxtaposition used in surrealist collage and Dada assemblage. These media deal with the last century’s sensibility in visual thinking when the world was represented in fragmented realities. At its heart, the strength of collage is its poetic tactics to create meanings through rupture and upheaval and to dissent. It first negates and sometime even obliterates the existing mainstream narrative and the results are unpremeditated, unexpected, disparate, and unanswerable. These assemblages will resist both identification and categorization.
This is Collage represents a wide range of styles, attributes, and compositional motifs. Whether made with scissors and paste, or in a manner more technologically advanced, this group show will juxtapose a collection of new collages made by emerging artists within the context of the 21st century. In the Information age where information and images are ever present perhaps these new collages can reverse our relationship with the culture of images from information back to the poetics.