Found paper, 18.75 x 15.5 in.
Maggie Groat meticulously collects, organizes, and layers found paper with a ritualistic patience. Her process unfolds through creating imperfect symmetries, continually unveiling new possibilities in her material interactions. Her pieces, rich with intricate arrangements of shells, seeds, and abstract shapes, beautifully showcase her unique style and visual rhythm.
Found paper, 14.5 x 12.5 in.
Collage allows me to engage with and manipulate a collection of pre-existing contexts in order to make something that fills a particular desire or use. For me this is a productive place to start, not from the endlessly possible blank page, but rather from a set of limitations and references to the histories and messiness of the worlds, and things within it, that we inherit. Methodologies of collage drive my production and have been the through line of a practice that sometimes can feel scattered. Employing collage in its sense of a verb, to glue, or to put two or more things together, is the thread that stitches the logic together.
Found paper, 11.5 x 15.25 in.
I work on many collages at a time, and these collections are always in response to a particular prompt or idea that creates an interconnected grouping. The themes I engage with over the years have shifted with my interests, artistic development and experimentation, the available or sourced materials I am using, and situational or contextual responsiveness. For example, my recent works on paper have been thinking about how collage can be used as a tool of ongoing and active study into themes of slowness, ritual, transformation, healing, and resistance, while previous works sought to record or document psychedelic encounters with the natural world, or speculative archeological futures.
Found paper, 14.75 x 12.5 in.
There are definitely throughlines to the way I approach material, the way I cut or assemble cutouts or objects, I am not sure that I can name this specifically, but I am aware of when my making sits within a familiarity and when I am being more inventive or developmental in my process. I have familiar grooves of making that I can easily slip back into, and kinds of compositions that I seem to obsessively return to, say a kind of taxonomical arrangement on a found ground, layering textures and patterns that seem to melt into one another, or creating imperfect symmetries between things that are uncannily alike like but completely disparate. I am deeply interested in collaborating with the found materials I employ, and when I lean into this collaboration, instead of trying too hard to bend something into shape, it is where I most often find new making strategies. I think I am often surprised with the continued creative possibilities of the medium.
Found paper, 14.25 x 18.75 in.
Using methodologies of collage, I make images and objects from found and salvaged materials. I am interested in the utility of images, in the disruption of the archive and its reassembly to create speculative futures and documentation of otherworldly or uncanny experiences. I am engaged in the transformative, ritual potential of reuse while living in times of climate emergency and strive to use states of being in-between, intuition, acts of care, responsiveness, decolonial strategies and hopeful speculation to create.
Found paper, 15.5 x 19.25 in.
Installation View, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto
Maggie Groat is an artist and educator who lives in Canada. She received her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Guelph in 2010. Groat has taught at the University of Guelph, University of Toronto, and at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she was the Audain Artist Scholar in Residence in 2014.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
AARON JONES (b.1993, Toronto) creates objects and images to explore the inherent possibilities in world-building and abstraction. Employing found images, video and lens-based media, he works with different forms of collage to build characters and spaces that reflect upon the nuances of his own upbringing and current life, as a way of finding peace.
HELEN MARTEN works across sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and writing to create a body of work that questions the stability of the material world and our place within it. Alluding to ideas, systems, and experiences, her work across media articulates complex investigations into the ways in which we exist and understand the world around us.
MICOSH HOLLAND is a German collage artist who uses vintage materials and digital tools to create modern-day Dada art. His work is influenced by 20th century Surrealism, Constructivism, and Dadaism, and is sometimes political, aesthetic, or non-conformist.
MICHAEL HARNISH begins his paintings with paper collages from sources like botanical books, fashion magazines, and commercial signage in Southern California. His paintings, inspired by these collages, range from accurate depictions to improvisations. Flora, such as local cactus, agave, tropical plants, and grocery store orchids, is central, blending high and low aesthetics.
Multi-media artist TADAHHIRO GUNJI'S abstract works in his Collectivity series focus around his use of organic lines formed by the gaps between the separate pieces, and acknowledge the existence of invisible boundaries.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ READ
Contemporary Collage Magazine #2
The second printed issue features exclusive interviews with: Deborah Roberts, Fred Free, Louis Reith, Jimmy Turrell, Stef de Brabander and more. Cover printed on 300gsm mat laminate, inside pages 110gsm uncoated, clocking in at 144 pages.
▼ READ
Pacifico Silano – Shadow Cast
The latest handmade, limited edition book by artist Pacifico Silano. Known for his practice of excavating melancholy, tension, and friction from vintage gay pornography, Silano continues his exploration of the dark interior of queer identity through this new book.
▼ LISTEN
Four Tet – Three (2024)
Four Tet serves as the moniker for Keiran Hebden's solo endeavors. "Three," Hebden's twelfth studio album, presents a hypnotic and meditative auditory experience, weaving in influences reminiscent of Aphex Twin.
