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FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Saturated Serenity
Burlington, Vermont, USA. Lauren Hood’s work explores romanticized images of couples and individuals in retro landscapes and scenes. Her work emphasizes moody and sometimes monochromatic color schemes of carefully layered images. Lauren works strictly with vintage ephemera to offer snapshots into different realms. MORE
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Nonsense Is All OK
Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Aaron Whitmoyer says about his work, "The mind is full of contradictions, whether in thought, visual perception, sound, or touch. Should art make sense? Found objects and images dictate composition that transcends logic. The influence of technology on our daily lives is exciting, bright, and new, but is riddled with flaws. Collage is the perfect medium to embrace spontaneity, anomalies and absurdity. Wrinkled, torn, dirty, clean, smooth, kitschy, hokey, unplanned, nonsense is all ok." MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Missing Pieces
at NOMA Gallery in Frederick, Maryland, USA through 30 January 2022. Virginia Sperry’s “Missing Pieces” is a series of paper collages and mixed media sculptures exploring a white woman’s personal journey through the complex issue of race in American History. Sperry has spent the past two years encountering new and renewed knowledge about the realities of racism and what it means to be white in America. With this body of work she attempts to look beyond her initial feelings of guilt and shame in order to come to terms with her role in the ongoing inequities that are rooted in the founding of this country. She hopes her artwork promotes a thoughtful dialogue about these issues that will lead to sustained positive change. MORE
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COLLAGE ON VIEW
Clarity and Hope
Lisa Sheets at Ryan James Fine Arts in Kirkland, Washington, USA through 30 January 2022. Lisa Sheets’ mixed media collages often explore history, gender roles, cultural norms, and how these things impact our lives. Sheets uses combinations of religious and historical iconography along with pop culture images, creating a lens to glimpse into our history and reflect on its influence on our present. Through researching historical materials from the last pandemic, Sheets seeks to create images that offer clarity and hope in the current challenges of our modern crisis. MORE
FROM KOLAJ 34
Scraps of Things
Jen Broemel approaches quilts as if they are collage. In 2016, she left the practice of architecture after her third child was born and took up sewing. “I was lucky to find groups of open-minded quilters to sew with and always felt freedom to explore the techniques I was learning in my own way. This is how I came to realize I was an artist.” A portfolio of Jen Broemel’s work appears in Kolaj 34. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Painting the Ghost
Moira Crone at Second Story Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA through 4 February 2022. The artist says about this work, "My subject is our precarious present, our glorious vulnerability in this region, a condition now shared by so many on this planet. 'Painting the Ghost: Precarity/Presence/Solace' is a collection of large-scale portraits enveloped, and penetrated by the landscapes that engendered them–landscapes that will be here when they are gone." MORE
CALL TO ARTISTS
Cut-Out Pages
for the World Collage Day Special Edition
Deadline: February 22, 2022. In honor of World Collage Day, Kolaj Magazine will issue a Special Edition of the magazine that features Cut-Out Pages and articles about the collage community. A Cut-Out Page is a selection of fragments that one can use to make a collage. The feature reflects artists’ styles and approaches to collage making and shows how artists select and organize fragments. People use the Cut-Out Pages to make collage. For instructions on how to make and submit a Cut-Out Page, visit the Call to Artists. MORE
ORDER A COPY
BOOK LAUNCH & TALK
Knoxville Museum of Art
2PM | Saturday, January 29, 2022
Free & Open to all.
The exhibition, "Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream" is on view at the museum until February 4, 2022. MORE
BOOK
Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream
A companion book to the project of the same name, Ric Kasini Kadour unpacks what monuments are and their role in our communities. He takes the reader on a tour from the Megalithic Temples of Malta to Brú na Bóinne in Ireland to the Confederate monuments of Obion County, Tennessee to the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. Kadour asks us to consider monuments as sites of collective memory and as places to reflect upon history, even when that history is false or misleading. He then shows us what happens when collage artists reimagine these spaces as sites of truth and reconciliation. The book features the collages of eighteen international artists made a series of collages that reimagined the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland, which, from 1747 to 1915, commemorated the Duke of Cumberland's 1745 victory over the Scots at Culloden, as 21st century beacons of hope and reconciliation. MORE
Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream is automatically sent to Silver Scissors & Golden Glue Members of Kolaj Institute. These special members of Kolaj Institute support residencies, fellowships, publications, and traveling programs while receiving a piece of the collage community to their mailbox each month. Join before January 31, 2022 to start your membership with this title. LEARN MORE
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 34, we hope it leads you to asking great questions.
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Kolaj 34
From Rockwall, Texas to Belarus to Dublin, Ireland, Kolaj 34 offers an international view of collage. In this issue we look at how the medium is being used to critique fashion advertising, build community, and investigate Black, Victorian spirituality. Writers wrestle with ideas about illusionary spaces, the psychology of the creative process, and concepts that expand our understanding of collage.
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
COLLAGE BOOK
Tissue Box:
A Pandemic Response
Boite à mouchoir: Une réponse à la pandémie. In Spring 2020, as the world was going into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Quebec Collagiste Virginie Maltais felt a deep need for a point of reference. Her solution was a project that asked collage artists from around the world to make a collage using the top of a tissue box. "Small projects are important. You regain your courage and hope when you start and manage to finish something. There is no small project. We do big projects with lots of little steps. Step by step, we move forward. Together. And it is all of these small steps, together, that led to the creation of this book." Maltais worked with Kolaj Institute and Kasini House to produce a bilingual book about the project. MORE
COLLAGE BOOK
transitional MOMENTS
transitional MOMENTS: restoring equilibrium through the art of collage includes one hundred collages selected from over 2000 submissions created from 600 collage packets sent to artists around the world for World Collage Day 2021 by the Arizona Collage Collective. transitional MOMENTS "reflects our current state of uncertainty as we wrestle with feeling constrained, disoriented and suspended in air between what was and what will be. Yet, these thresholds, unsettling as they are, can be spaces of great creativity and transformation," writes ACC's Suzanne Winkel. MORE
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
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
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
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.
