UVA’s Overlook Gallery
175 Washington St., Brighton MA 02135
October 27 – December 8, 2024
Curated by Jessica Hernandez
Exhibit Assistants: Yuriko Ramirez and Eleanor Bernard
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 2pm | RSVP
Exhibit Statement
Touching Collage is a group exhibition of fifteen artists whose works explore the titular idea materially and conceptually. They’ve not only revealed a diverse array of aesthetic interests by working in media such as sculpture, video, VR, artist books, photographic collage, and mixed media painting, but their works have collectively generated four central themes.
For Kim Triedman, Mary Gillis, and Madeline Lee poetry, narrative, and the archive are central. Arranging photographs both found and her own on canvas and reclaimed windows, Triedman approaches collage as “a kind of visual poetry,” often telling stories of gender, womanhood, and femininity. Her three works in this show allude to subjects of self-fashioning, performance, and the female gaze as they depict two portrait scenes and one instance of collective choreography.
In regard to Gillis and Lee, both produce artist books. Gillis produces two contrasting works: the first being a pamphlet-structured book with paper collages inspired by M.M. Gassier’s “Wind Poem,” while the second is an accordion structure that opts for gestural ink-markings on the pages – doing away with content typically expected from this kind of bounded object and instead creating a Book without Text or Pictures.
For Lee, the book serves as an archival object that records, reassembles, and reimagines previous projects. Reconfigured – a book provides an intimate reflection on self, interiority, and love using text under trace paper and a series of digital photo prints layered with other materials. In contrast, her other work in the exhibit Observing Sites of Friction focuses on her relationship to the outer world. Created from 2018-2019, the research-based text centers the Somerville ArtFarm, examining the land’s history as a “former waste transfer station and incinerator” and current movements to transform the space into a revitalized community hub.
Adrienne Shishko, MOSH Studio, Elizabeth Rennie, Fiona Kennedy, and Kelli Nyman demonstrate an interest in materials found, sourced, and collected. Shishko utilizes repurposed fabric inspired by the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama while the remaining four artists explore paper in unique and complementary ways. MOSH Studio transforms past artworks into bright, blue and green textures; Rennie’s grids and rectangles in her work Pause delve into varied color experiments; Kennedy’s collages from her Love Pattern series represent practices in restraint, minimalism, and fine cuts; and Nyman’s pieces border on sculpture, offering a profound interrogation of paper’s potential for form, shape, fold, and relief.
Caroline Sirois, Abby Neale, and Aanika Akkaraju take us fully into the realm of sculpture as they create works consisting of fragments sutured, fastened, and embedded together. Collectively, they use a range of tough and weathered matter such as concrete, old texts, cast iron grates, and textile scraps. Tackling subjects equally as harsh as the materials, these artists reference a range of issues: “sediments of time and sediments of thinking” (Sirois), capitalist forms of production and the fashion industry (Neale), and “the need for a complete and total overhaul of our societal systems” (Akkaraju).
Moving into photography, video, and sound, Allida Warn, Alysia Macaulay, Meredith Starr, Dayna Leavitt, and Corey Brown create scenes physical and digital, real and reworked. Warn explores the city of Jamaica Plain, MA through aluminum prints depicting an “an animated process drawing of seasonal change” while Macaulay reflects on her time in Ocala, FL – creating the mirrored mixed-media photographic collage Two Live Oaks – Mondrian Style.
A similar focus on place, Leavitt and Starr have created a virtual reality based on their transatlantic collaboration. Their process includes exchanging images, text, and everyday observations, later forging the edited material into an imagined virtual space. Corey Brown goes further into constructed spaces, taking inspiration from the online sphere and producing a video collage of disparate images. Brown’s second work in the show might be understood as its analog counterpart – an acrylic work that incorporates much of the same feel and methods albeit through paint.
Overall, with such a range of ideas and practices represented, the exhibit itself is a collage richly generated by the artists.
Artists: Aanika Akkaraju, Corey Brown, Mary Gillis, Fiona Kennedy, Dayna Leavitt and Meredith Starr, Madeline Lee, Alysia Macaulay, Abby Neale, Kelli Nyman, Elizabeth Rennie, Adrienne Shishko, Caroline Sirois, MOSH Studio, Kim Triedman, and Allida Warn.