The “collage aesthetic” dominated the twentieth century, and it dominates the dawn of the 21st. Digital media have given those who would take apart, rummage through, and reassemble the seen world that many more tools. The computer also liberates vast swaths of actual, concrete material, from books to billboards, from their primary function(s), allowing such stuff to fall into the hands of those who would re-fashion it into images and objects that otherwise elude even the roving eye of cyberspace (until posted, of course) and that amplify and celebrate materiality itself.

Many substances get swallowed into the act of collaging, but none is as basic to the collage process, conceptually and materially, as is paper. Collage per se is a paper-based medium, and – even though all of them work with other media – the seven artists showing here not only specialize in paperwork, but demonstrate a mastery of paper’s modality; that is, they regard paper not simply as support, but as medium (and one imbued with social and historical meaning, even in the digital age). These artists may find or may choose their ingredients; they may lie their findings flat or let them hang or spring off the support; they may work sequentially, as if composing a book, or may work uniquely, as if spilling the contents of the mind and the world onto a single screen; they may work intimately, pulling our eyes into texts and structures at an almost microscopic level, or may work monumentally, as if collaging space itself. Even as it relies on paper as its point of departure and return, collage – certainly as practiced here – is an omnivorous method. Indeed, it is more than a method:
it is a way of seeing, even a way of life.

Peter Frank
Los Angeles, CA
September 2014