It’s collage season. Every elementary schooler in this part of the world has, at some point, picked up a fallen leaf and glued it to a piece of paper: voilà, a collage. But is glue really what holds collages together?
That’s one of the questions curator and artist David Powell investigates with “Collage/Uncollage” at the Phoenix in Waterbury (and in the related “Juxtaposition Show,” concurrently at Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph). In addition to works by eight artists, Powell has compiled a gallery packet of writings on the topic.
They include an essay by artist Todd Bartel, who posits the idea of “uncollage.” Where collage is an accumulation of things glued together, “uncollage is seamless unison, but uncollage can also be an instigatory connection prompted by a readymade or a juxtaposition of any two things,” he writes. The category is a bit too broad to be useful: By his definition, the only thing that’s neither collage nor uncollage would be pure abstraction.
The works in the show tell a different story. What’s exciting about them — and what makes them collage even when they aren’t glued — is the way they explore ruptures between ideas. They place things that don’t make logical sense together in pictures that do make visual sense; the disjunction can be spooky, unnerving and wonderfully surprising.
Leslie Fry‘s prints on aluminum don’t seem like collage: At first glance, the viewer might suspect Photoshop. In reality, Fry stages paper cutouts and then photographs them, sometimes in real settings. In “Chthonic,” a Renaissance face pokes out from underneath flowers in a compost pile. The cracks in the portrait’s painted surface contrast with the photo clarity of eggshells and rotting leaves, creating a puzzling image.
In “Leafscape,” Fry combines a photo of a leaf with a snippet of painted feet to suggest a body resting on a distant, picturesque landscape. Though the image has very few separate elements, the leaf’s deep, realistic shadow binds them together in an arresting composition.
Similar art historical sources play into Jennifer Koch‘s assemblages, which take a more maximalist approach. In “Specimen #62 After Raphael,” she brings together what was originally an early 16th-century diptych of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni with a large junk drawer’s worth of studio detritus: spools of thread, bent pencils, doll parts, a very small ship in a bottle. Those items erupt from the couple’s heads, as though they are planning a million projects beneath their posed portrait calm. Color successfully unifies the 44-by-41-inch work, as does Koch’s skillful use of negative space. Amid the bright bustle of the stuff and the Donis’ sumptuous outfits, there’s a spare bit of calm sky pieced together from Raphael’s backgrounds.
Across the gallery, Luciana Frigerio‘s gorgeous shadow boxes, housed in antique clock bodies, likewise pair historical portraiture with objects. She tells incomplete and alluring stories through deliberate placement of cutout images, as well as brass gears, an antique light bulb and other bits.
In “So Disappointed,” women lament among ocean waves, numbered brass buttons connecting them to a diagram of moons overhead. Nearby, a songbird in “Bird, Chair” uproots a building-size chair from a city, pulling the furniture by real threads held in its beak. The narratives read like ambiguous references to half-forgotten folktales. In contrast, Frigerio makes it very clear what’s going on in her hilarious “Abduction” series of collages: Vintage irons, cups and kitchen tools become UFOs, sucking people and objects out of 19th-century paintings.
Collage lends itself to funny juxtapositions, and it’s a quick jump from there to satire. Michael Oatman contributes several political works to the show, making his points with surreal humor. In “F(armed),” he comments on rural America’s co-optation by a culture of violence. Vintage farm scenes mix with old army illustrations, and the result is exploding tractors. A custom-built frame bends around this image that a rectangular format wouldn’t be able to contain, highlighting the absurdity of the whole scene.
Oatman’s 5-by-4-foot collage “American Storm” hits a little too close to home right now: In it, tornadoes made out of tires touch down on an idyllic mountain landscape.
In another work, “American Spring (after Wallace Berman),” Oatman quotes Berman’s Verifax collages, made with an early copy machine in the 1960s and ’70s. Berman collaged different images onto a recurring one: an advertisement for a handheld transistor radio. Here, Oatman has done the same with a photo of a smartphone taken from a U.S. Postal Service brochure. The repeated images flow together, becoming a powerful grid of Black hands holding portable screens that frame vintage illustrations of police, the military and civil rights-era scenes.
Laura Christensen goes further back for her sources. While Victorian portrait photographers commonly touched up their work with charcoal, she takes that practice further, augmenting antique originals with her own charcoal additions. In one image, a squirrel pops up from a respectable gentleman’s coiffure; in another, a cranky baby shares the scene with a swooping owl.
Christensen’s mysterious images pair well with Powell’s. His collages lean toward flora and fauna more than portraiture. Some are whimsical: “Bugsy’s Fun Safari” combines animals from encyclopedia engravings, placing an eel within kissing distance of a giraffe. Others seem to have overt messages, such as “Arctic Debris,” which looks like an early 20th-century illustration of the Arctic but also incorporates a contemporary view of its destruction.
Bartel’s contributions are harder to parse but aesthetically rich. Hinged frames make his “interlocking” collages visible from both sides. The paper itself becomes important in these works, with holes and discoloration giving physical presence to the dictionary definitions and map fragments that make up his delicate compositions.
Contrast that delicacy with Peter Thomashow‘s assemblages of vintage games and toys. He arranges bold, colorful objects in wooden boxes, sometimes pushing them toward abstraction, as in “Wolfson Colour Study.” At other times, he highlights the toys’ extreme creepiness — as in “Anatomy,” a vintage illustration paired with electrical wires that’s surely the scariest-ever version of Operation.
Viewers of “Collage/Uncollage” will also want to take in the work of one artist who’s not featured there: E.L. Schmidt, whose solo show is directly upstairs at the Hesterly Black at Waterbury Studios. Her work includes several collages that use negative space and rich color to suggest unspecified but believable forms made from bits of birds, religious iconography and ads.
Schmidt’s show is a smart companion to the one downstairs, though all of the accumulated details — collaged and uncollaged — are a lot to take in. As Phoenix gallerist Joseph Pensak writes in his essay in the gallery packet, “Don’t overthink it, but don’t underthink it either.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Becoming Unstuck | “Collage/Uncollage” highlights the medium’s strengths”
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.
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