Collage

Collage as an element of fine art began during the period of Analytical Cubism in the early 20th century. Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were interested n the visual interpretation of three-dimensional reality and its transformation into the flat picture plane of two-dimensional art. Rather than approach their subjects from a rational, static point of view, the Cubists discarded the notion of Renaissance perspective and depicted forms from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. This avant-garde concept was implemented with a flair for experimentation in the use of materials and techniques in painting and drawing. A natural outcropping of this process was the birth of collage.

The assemblage of pieces of visual and textual materials in highly individualistic styles is what makes collage so fascinating. There is a propensity toward collage in the Western New York region, perhaps to the point of identifying a special influence on the post-modern move to appropriate imagery from popular culture. And yet an exhibition devoted to the subject has never before been mounted in Buffalo. COLLAGE, organized by Nancy Weekly, is a look at some of the ways that the medium has been used by artists in Western New York.

Seven artists shave been selected for their distinctive styles. The are: Sara Baker Michalak, who works in a calligraphic manner with Oriental newspapers and other materials; Charles Clough, who inlays and overlays sections of rigorously finger-painted surfaces and sometimes incorporates secondary images of earlier works; Susan Copley, whose experimentation with new media has led her to both two- and three-dimensional collages composed of self-made materials; Seymour Drumlevitch, who draws on elements of ancient, mythological, illuminated manuscripts as sources for contemporary compositions; Cynthia Feyrer, who works in a miniature scale with collected bits of paper detritus; Joseph Radoccia, who creates tableaux for allegorical subjects with painted structures and found objects and small sculptured figures, and Andrew Topolski, who uses a mathematical approach to deconstruct nuclear texts and transpose them into musical scores and architectonic, mixed media drawings. Clough, Radoccia, and Topolski now live in New York City.

The radical difference in style among these artists points to the wide range of collage produced in this area. What they hold in common is a level of artistic process that adds factors that are then left to the viewer to reassemble in an undetermined fashion.

Just as the Surrealists were interested in Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and the implications of dream analysis as a prototype for their arts, contemporary art critics have taken note of Jacques Lacan’s premise that the unconscious is structed like a language. Art is composed of elements that are first perceived on a superficial level and then on an interpretive or associational level. Collage is inherently made up of disparate parts that are assembled to create a whole which has a new context generated by the juxtaposition of these parts in a manner that is not necessarily rational. Elements are overlapped and hidden by other pieces as they are added. Because the compositional process is so visually manifest, collage resembles the formation of thought. In this sense, it could be said that collage is a visual representation of the unconscious. —N.W.

This exhibition was supported, in part, by public funds form the New York Council on the Arts. Additional support was provided by the City of Buffalo and a grant from the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation.