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COLLAGE ON VIEW
Aboutness
Jean Hess at the Kresge Memorial Library Gallery in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, USA through 10 October 2021. Jean Hess‘ “Aboutness” includes collage paintings that combine found-paper ephemera, paint, resins and pencil as well as hand-stitched collages of antique textiles. Although Hess works with certain themes in mind, these collages are not meant to tell a story. Hess prefers to concentrate on focused process and energy expenditure to achieve work that is deep or salient rather than topical. Curated by Jeffrey Morton. MORE
FROM KOLAJ 33
Keeping Busy
For over five decades, Kenneth Weichel has been making collage and publishing books. In 1971, he started the poetry magazine, Androgyne, which turned into Androgyne Books in 1976. His publications featured work by dozens of artists alongside the literary texts. More recently, Weichel has started to show his own unique brand of collage. Independent culture publishing is hard work and its rewards are elusive. Kolaj Magazine's Ric Kasini Kadour was curious to speak to Weichel and learn about how books were made and artists got together before the Internet made it all so easy. Their conversation, which moved from speaking about his collage making to how he became a publisher, appears in Kolaj 33. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Tapestries of Memory
Deborah Yasinsky at Empty Set in Bronx, New York, USA through 9 October 2021. Deborah Yasinsky's "Tapestries of Memory" explores narratives of fear, trauma, mourning, and redemption. With this installation, she investigates experience and imagination to create surreal, escapist environments which approach past trauma through symbolic intermediaries that illuminate despair and hope. Tapestries recontextualize as a tableau of memory, mourning, and redemptive adoration. They are brought to life through painting, drawing, ceramics, and film, encrusting them in richly layered bejeweled beauty, deeply connected to medieval ornamentation, and layered in symbolism. Birds, unicorns, forest imagery, flattened perspective figures, and jeweled objects immerse across media. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Autochthonous Cities & Other Liminal Works
at Laura Vincent Design and Gallery in Portland, Oregon, USA through 12 October 2021. Clive Knights writes about the work in this show, "I maintain that the work presented...is the outcome of...acts of drawing, despite the fact that it is an exhibition of collages and monotypes. I consider each work to be the offspring of a 'drawing out', a cultivation of sorts, a tillage of predominantly found materials that, in the spontaneity and hard graft of the art-making activity, coalesce their visual and semantic nutrients into new figurative outgrowths, rootings and sproutings, interments and dehiscences." MORE
FROM KOLAJ 33
Collage in A Dangerous Time
For those driven to create during dangerous periods in history, art is not an indulgence. To Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, life under Fascism led to socially committed art, utopian dreams and, finally, tragedy. Her photo collages, made during the rise of National Socialism in Austria, are evidence that imagination can flourish, even in dark times. Ginger Sedlarova recounts the history of this remarkable artist in Kolaj 33, “Between 1930 and 1934, when Vienna was undergoing waves of Nazi terror, Friedl took on Adolf Hitler through anti-fascist and anti-capitalist montages, creating works that attacked Der Führer and his movement and also focusing on children and other victims left behind by the era’s political and moral disasters.” MORE
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Biohazard
New York, New York, USA. By dissecting, excising, and rearranging the biohazard label, Ansel Oommen, a clinical laboratory technologist, engages in the process of traumatic reconstruction through collage, integrating memory, metabolizing trauma and grief, and illuminating how elements of public health, mental health, and ecology all overlap. MORE
COLLAGE BOOKS
Illustriertes Spielbuch für Mädchen
by Susanna Lakner. The artist's third book at Redfoxpress, lllustriertes Spielbuch für Mädchen (Illustrated Playbook for Girls) is an altered book, based on the play Der Tod des Tizian (The Dead of Titian) written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1892. Lakner found the book on the rummage table of an antiquarian bookshop and made a collage book from the illustrations of an occupation book for girls from the 18th century, images of a medical book and a French Larousse lexicon. She kept the title of the girl’s book. MORE
Calls to Artists
Deadline: 26 September 2021
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Deadline: 26 September 2021
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Current Issue
Our goal with every issue is that Kolaj Magazine is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of contemporary collage in art, culture, and society. We not only hope you enjoy the articles and images in Kolaj #33, we hope it leads you to asking great questions.
PRINT MAGAZINE
Kolaj 33
Handling from “The Lives of Dahlias” series by Leslie Fry is on the cover of Kolaj 33. The blending of human, natural, and architectural motifs is a hallmark of Surrealism. Fry steps into this arena with a sword of feminist thinking and cuts through the dogma. Her work shows how Surrealism can reorient our thinking about nature. An article about her work appears in the issue.
Each issue of Kolaj Magazine shows how collage artists are making their way through the world. International in scope, we explore all aspects of collage and its impact on society and culture. MORE
Recent Publications
NEW BOOK
Oh, Money! Money!
by Eleanor H. Porter
Kolaj Institute is pleased to announce the publication of Oh, Money! Money!by Eleanor H. Porter and illustrated by a collective of collage artists. In Porter’s 1918 novel, a Chicago multi-millionaire struggles to decide to whom he should leave his money. The book is a time capsule of early 20th century American life with a strong focus on the lives of women and observations about material culture and communities before the rampant consumerism of the 1920s and the Great Depression. To illustrate the book, Kolaj Institute organized a residency that brought together ten artists who worked collaboratively to make sixty-three collages that interpret Porter’s novel for a 21st century audience. MORE
FROM ARTSHOP
Kolaj Year Eight Collectors Pack
NOW AVAILABLE! The Kolaj Magazine Year Eight Collectors Pack includes Issues 29, 30, 31, and 32. Our goal with every issue is that Kolaj Magazine is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of contemporary collage in art, culture, and society. MORE
BOOK
The Money $how: Cash, Labor, Capitalism & Collage
The Money $how juxtaposes contemporary artwork against fragments of history and literature as a way of showing how collage can help us deconstruct culture and understand the world differently. Artists collage dollar bills into flowers and mine material remnants to tell stories about home economics. MORE
SPECIAL EDITION
World Collage Day 2021
In honour of World Collage Day, May 8, 2021, Kolaj Magazine is releasing a special edition of the magazine. The Special Edition is full of Cut-Out Pages and stories from inspiring collage artists. MORE
Note: The World Collage Day Special Edition is not included in a regular Kolaj Magazine subscription.
COLLAGE BOOK
Unfamiliar Vegetables: Variations in Collage
Unfamiliar Vegetables is a collection of collage where each of the fifty artists interpreted, in their own way, Carlotta Bonnecaze’s 1892 Carnival float design Familiar Vegetables. Project organizer Christopher Kurts observed, “Unfamiliar Vegetables is an experiment in controlled chaos….tiny variations within each artist’s creative sphere accumulate until the outcomes are as unique as the people creating them.” MORE
COLLAGE COMMUNITIES
The International Directory of Collage Communities
The 104-page book is a survey of collage networks, guilds, communities, and projects as well as online efforts and groups focused on collage research. For each community, the directory presents their key activities, mission, how to join, and a bit of their history. Copious images illustrate the book. MORE
BOOK
Radical Reimaginings
The curators of the 96-page book invited artists who use collage in their practice to put forward a work of art that offers a visual narrative that speaks to the unprecedented change unfolding in 2020. An essay by Ric Kasini Kadour reflects upon collage's unique ability to imagine new realities. Forty artists from nine countries and multiple Indigenous peoples—Salish-Kootenai/Métis-Cree/Sho-Ban, Tlingit/Nisga’a, Oglala/Lakota, and Seneca Nation—offer a variety of perspectives. The voices of Black, Latinx, Native, and white Americans mingle with those from Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Canada, France, and Germany. Artwork is accompanied by a statement in which the artists describe how they want to reimagine the world. MORE
BOOK
Collage Magic
by Emma Anna
Part autobiography, part fantasy, Emma Anna’s vision of The New Old World (aka The NOW) fuses vintage ephemera with modern imaging technologies. Emma shapes this strange world by using the pen tool from Adobe Photoshop as her magic wand, in the process declaring herself to be a “collage magician”. Part artist book, part document of art making, Collage Magic, from La Casa Verde Editions, is Emma Anna’s journey through magic and art. MORE
BOOK
Revolutionary Paths
When the collage is presented in exhibition, it is often done so without the critical framework granted other mediums. In "Revolutionary Paths: Critical Issues in Collage", exhibition curator Ric Kasini Kadour presents examples of collage that represent various aspects and takes on the medium. Each work in the exhibition represents the potential for deeper inquiry and further curatorial exploration of the medium. MORE
BOOK
Cultural Deconstructions
Collage is unique as a medium in that it uses as its material artifacts from the world itself. To harvest those fragments, the artist must first deconstruct culture; they must select, cut, and remove the elements they do not wish to use and then reconstruct work that tells a new story. In "Cultural Deconstructions: Critical Issues in Collage", exhibition curator Ric Kasini Kadour presents examples of collage artists who are deconstructing identity as a way to critique culture. MORE
Our goal with every issue is that Kolaj Magazine is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of contemporary collage in art, culture, and society. Each issue of Kolaj Magazine is dedicated to reviewing and surveying contemporary collage with an international perspective. We are interested in collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century art movement.
