I’m curating an exhibition in Portland, ME. Here are the details and a statement I wrote for it:
Disparition
An exhibition of contemporary artists influenced by collage.
Works by Aimee Belanger, Jacob Bluestone, Amelia Bywater, Derek Jackson, Conor Kelly, Nicolas Party, Anya Pover, and John Skibo.
Curated by A. D. Jacobson.
June 5th-July 11th (Wed-Sat)
Preview Thursday June 4th 5-7pm
Zero Station
222 Anderson St.
Portland, ME
La Disparition was published in 1969 by Georges Perec. The English translation is titled A Void. The novel follows a group of friends as they search for a missing companion. It was written entirely without the letter e.
We are in a constant struggle to regress into the past, back to the muted colors and clear skies of yesteryear. At the same time we are bound by the conveniences and contrivances of the day. We are endlessly pulled apart at the seams; we fissure and crack. Collage produces meaning though disconnection, disparate cut-outs pieced together with stick-glue and twine. In this two step process, first is the removal, the dissolution of context from the appropriated excerpts. Then, inevitably, we look back and make sense of the erratic bits and bobs, fashion a new image out of the null set of meaning.
This aesthetic of entropy invades our daily consciousness: app stores and Wikipedia, $1 used book trolleys on the sidewalk, grotesque murals and graffiti on the side of department stores. We are harangued in the crosswalk by towering billboards. We are engulfed by indecisiveness borne out of the accumulation of technologies, of styles, of structures. Collage as art form seeks to capture this everythingness and distill it into decisive indecision, to reason the unreasonable. Here are presented works that are to varying degrees assemblages of form, media, conception, and installational practices. This is an exhibition of collage. This is not an exhibition of collage.
A. D. Jacobson
A. D. Jacobson 