Cut & Paste: A Group Exhibition opened Friday, June 2, and runs through July 7, 2023. This IFCI exhibition features the work of nearly 50 local, national, and international artists. These artists are tied together by their medium of choice: collage. Webster’s Dictionary defines collage as “a piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric onto a backing.” Wikipedia states that “collage from the French: coller, ‘to glue’ or ’to stick together’; is a technique of art creation...by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.”

This exhibition includes images from nature—such as animals, insects, flower gardens, vegetable patches, and the forest—as seen through cut-outs of fragmented colors and outline designs and shapes intermingled with texture and paint, even seen through the literal frame of a window. Some images are urban in nature, propped up on maps or classical landscapes with strange or oddly faceted fixtures that don’t quite fit. There are collage assemblages of 2 and 3-dimensions, with protruding objects jutting off of the canvas, like Dylan John Sidoriak’s  Sisyphus There are Other Worlds They Have Not Told You of and Elvis Maryshine’s untitled mixed media piece with found materials, including netting, playing cards, cigarette cases, sequins, thread, and odd bits of metal. The appropriation of others’ artwork includes photographs and familiar dated magazine clippings such as the work of Gabriel Brown in Rip Out My Pelvic Bone and Andrew Stuart H. in Toy Soldiers, as well as usurped artwork like that of Aletheia in The Alchemy of Idolatry and Carl Fuermann in Encounter, reconfigured into something totally new and sometimes mysterious: gas masks, soldiers, guns, film imagery, and assorted artificial or make-believe scenes. Glamor amidst dilapidation is perhaps as comforting as a teddy bear nestled with Prozac (Kerry Oberst). Iconography is borrowed from plastic happy-face bags (Elizabeth Little-Colland), childhood toys, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as seen in David Pohl’s The Neighborhood of Make Believe. Vinyl linoleum, wood, canvas, car plates, and bathroom signs combine into something different, and even sketchy perhaps, pulled together in a plastic frame. Copies made from copies sometimes blur the lines of what is original or real, unlike the art of the mechanical reproduction’s claim of exact sameness, like the revered can of tomato soup. The source material is sometimes the xeroxed interpretation of a facsimile of what were once “original” photographs, type, drawings, or paintings. Tape and glue allow for the reconstruction, or transformation, becoming the artists’ own artwork with images transplanted onto new surfaces such as canvas, glass, paper, mirror, and board. Pieces of fabric, color, shapes on shapes, and watercolor backgrounds give us tactile layers. Stolen analog images of Roman statues, strange astronauts and celestial figments  create other objects and give way to something sometimes slick and sometimes edgy, but ultimately something totally surprising. There is imagery conjuring up the likeness of John Kane, Andy Warhol, Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Cornell, and Romare Bearden. There is also: anime, King Kong, disco balls, violence, declarations, cries for help, rock stars, and ghostly images juxtaposed in ways that make us ask, “What is exactly the artist’s intention?”

Is a collage what it seems to be on the surface or is it an arcane message of irony or hyperbole resisting the attitudes and alchemy of history? Patterns of colors and images from newspapers are eloquently amassed and arranged, ripped, woven, streamed, colored, and covered with paint, paper, markers and varnish. What we have here for the viewer are layers and layers of imagery combined into startling and often curious arrangements of what might appear to be idyllic, but what is more often off-putting and uncomfortable: confrontation.     

- Sheila Ali, curator.

We here at The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination hope to challenge the viewer on their perception of collage, with such a broad array of styles and artistic intents. Come see the show and let us know what you think. Be sure to tag @ifcenter in any documentation or promotions of the show.

Regular Gallery hours are Saturdays from 2-5 pm and by appointment. The Irma Freeman Center welcomes groups to book events and tours to experience this engaging and visually provocative exhibit. The Closing Reception will be held on Friday, July 7th, 7-9 pm. For information call: (gallery office) 412-924-0634