 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Laurie Joan Aron The origin of collage was in destruction. The European world between the wars was collapsing, especially that of the losers, Germany and Austria. Their paper money was worthless. All paper could be treated as detritus, ripped and rearranged, no matter how carefully, to reflect the trash that the world had become. The idea was total destruction before total rebuilding.
Today, what made sense to Schwitters and others then no longer makes sense to me. In a stressful world that feels like it may blow up, literally or figuratively, at any moment, I turned to collage as a way of—literally—putting the pieces back together. Even though my collages begin with cut (never torn) pieces of paper (always from slick, colorful catalogs or magazines), when I join the pieces, I’m work to create singing and often unexpected harmonies of color, and even, at a remove through the photographed page, texture. I think about whether my purpose is served by pairing a clipping of lavender-painted stucco with a clipping of coral silk, or perhaps brick or taffeta. No matter what the photo conveys, the actual surface of the collage is as flat, slick and mysterious as a painting, with tricks of perspective built in by the shadows and shapes of the collage pieces. I work primarily with cut out pieces of pictures of textiles, with some building materials, mostly wood, added, usually working outward from a seemingly uncharacteristic pairing of images that are united in color, or I work from one image—a tiny reproduction of a work of art, or a picture of strongly patterned fabric sample—letting the colors pour out of it. Mixing color-harmonious patterns is another mode. My collage work is heavily influenced by my poetry, which I still sometimes write, in which I often placed sounds next to each other for a mood effect, developing a meaning with accretion of the feelings they produced in the reader. In fact, I also wrote poems which were collages of words “clipped,” (copied) from subway advertising and other signage. Some were hopeful, some anxiety-producing. If my collages tend toward the beautiful, well, that’s just what happens when I’m let loose with colors. There are mysterious ones that seem to have a narrative, jokes on art history, exercises in creating harmony out of random images. But there are none meant to assault or shock. You can see those images every day in the newspaper and on the Internet. Just a note: The bulk of the material I use comes from the recycle bins of my apartment building, my mailbox, and the clean-up efforts of my mother. I mat frame each collage, making the mat frame part of the total piece of work. You can’t take it apart without ruining the original.
|
