Analog Collage, 32 x 24 cm
In Matthew Rose's practice, surrealism meets mixed media through an expansive blend of collage techniques that range from minimalist to maximalist. Drawing inspiration from notable American artists like Ray Johnson and Jasper Johns, Rose labors into the night to deconstruct and rearrange paper and text. This endeavor culminates in what he dubs his "theory of everything," a complex blend of images and words that irresistibly defies explanation.
Analog Collage, 32 x 24 cm
My work veers from pure aesthetic essays in color or shape or form to full on narratives that exploit my sense of the chaos of history, time, consciousness. Sometimes my work is about exchange (commerce, lies, fabulations) we make with ourselves and others, while other times I’m interested in wish fulfillment, fashioning a world out of paper that draws me in visually and allows me to contemplate details, relationships, gravity, physics, love and sex and death. I’m aware that others don’t typically see what I see in my works, but I try to communicate a visual storm and pull people into it. I think my things are worth a look and then, a second look.
Analog Collage, 32 x 24 cm
My favorite thing is to start with a pile of virgin paper or a large old book and, using the various books and magazines and papers I’ve collected, launch into cobbling something out of the elements. The process of composing yields great joy and consternation. It’s work, though, after all. And in working, of course, I’m beating back my demons and constructing a kind of subjective scaffold from which to see the world, relationships, and myself. I have a serious interest in language and its role in the evolution of humankind. In making things, my process essentially scrapes the truth from my little existence. I know it’s only paper and printed material – realism’s detritus – and that the glues I use are weak when up against the throes of time, but that’s the game, isn’t it?
Analog Collage, 32 x 24 cm
32 x 24 cm
There are many reasons for living half my life in Paris. One of them is simply the variety and quantity of castoffs that wash up on the shores (the streets) of this magical city. I’m a scavenger by nature it seems; I vacuum the streets with my eyes and find books and vintage art and lifestyle magazines that have somehow resurfaced after decades on bookshelves or in homes. What attracts me most is the quality of the printing – the old offset and linotype reds, blues, yellows and blacks, and thick papers (often acid neutral). These days, it’s sadly all too digital and not very interesting. I’m as interested in Old Masters as I am in turn-of-the-century wallpaper. I want things people don’t want, and to give them life beyond the incinerator.
32 x 24 cm
Most contemporary collage artists have probably been influenced by Ray Johnson. Ray’s insanely beautiful draftsmanship, hijinx poetry and compositional genius and his mail art works served as a beacon to every lost artist floating about at sea. Ray was a friend and neighbor and I met him before I moved to France; and through Ray dozens of great artists allowed me into their orbit. It was an enduring gift.
32 x 24 cm
Matthew Rose is currently based in Paris, France.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
Born in Lisbon in 1979, Carla Cabanas’s work revolves around the methodologies of stretching the defined borders of the photography medium while dwelling on the issues of collective and cultural memory. Cabanas graduated in 2003 at the Visual Arts at School of Fine Arts and Design at Caldas da Rainha. In 2004 she finished the Advanced Course at Maumaus – School of Visual Arts, in Lisbon.
Tarrah Krajnak is an artist working across photography, performance, and poetry. She was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne. The artist was awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Lewis Baltz Research Fund Award, and the Hariban Award, Kyoto. She is also a recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Within the confines of her studio, B. Ingrid Olson (American, born 1987) records her body as it shifts and relates to the surroundings and the camera lens, while simultaneously exploring performativity, the passing of time, and what she refers to as “the power dynamics of seeing versus being seen.” To this end, her photographs often contain blurred or fragmented imagery, which Olson achieves by doubling, masking, or distorting her own likeness through the use of mirrors and the manipulation of light sources. The results of this dynamic process are multidimensional objects that capture the world as seen through the eyes of an artist.
Martha Naranjo Sandoval is a Brooklyn-based artist, publisher, cataloguer, and bookseller from Mexico City. She holds a degree in Film from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión in Mexico City, and an MFA from the International Center of Photography and Bard College. She is the co-founder of the editorial project Matarile Ediciones, which publishes work by artists who are immigrants or part of a recent diaspora.
Keisha Scarville has spent much of her life tracing routes of movement between the Caribbean and America in order to investigate her own lineage. Attempting to understand how notions of belonging and identity are formed and structured, her image-making practice visualises the latent narratives inscribed within the thresholds of memory across generations.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
VISIT
The Rose at Lumber Room
The Rose, on view until Oct. 28th in Portland, is curated by Justine Kurland and presents the work of forty-four artists, dating from the 1960s through to the present, and proposes a circular genealogy of collage. The exhibition imagines an extended family of artworks, where kinship is forged through association, at once amplifying themes and providing context through similarity and difference, sounding out feelings and language as a collective effort. The works convene like the petals of a rose: a collage in and of itself.
VISIT
Joe Rudko at Von Lintel Gallery
Double Take, on view from Oct. 21st - Dec. 2nd in Los Angeles, is a journey into the world of visual duality, where Joe Rudko masterfully presents new works that take the form of diptychs wherein one side is the inverse and opposite of the other; the white spaces in these collages are the backside of the images, showing handwritten notes, dates, and branding of the paper. It is an exhibition defined by its harmonious contradictions, and it deconstructs binary oppositions while simultaneously weaving them together.
VISIT
Future Focus: New Terrain at Parallel
Parallel LDN presents Future Focus, a programme dedicated to discovering contemporary shifts in art using photography in support of a better future. Through a series of exhibitions and curated content, we explore new visual dialogues that disrupt our preconceived notion on the ever evolving medium and give access to the artists that seek their own freedom through experimentation.
