Collage, an additive medium by definition, consistently produces mystery. The technique allows artists to investigate layering, concealing, masking, and covering: all acts which have the potential to reveal histories and ideas often hidden from view. The superposing of disparate elements levels their original separation, sparking connections and a certain metaphysical space. The works in this show use opacity, texture, rhythm, and see-through veils to shake the ground on which the viewer stands - surrealist vistas seep, and the irresistible urge to hear, touch, and look take over. Built around the magical yet formally rigorous collage work of artist Dorothy Hood, Strangeness, Tone, Translucency is a wander through collage today and its history.
Strangeness, Tone, Translucency takes its title from a blurb, written by Wayne Koestenbaum, on Meret Oppenheim’s recently published book of poetry The Loveliest Vowel Empties. In his lauding of the book, Koestenbaum describes Oppenheim and her peers as “artists of deep symbol, deep void. (...) [Oppenheim’s poetry offers] no dross, no affectation: instead, [she] gives us strangeness, tone, translucency.” In her surrealist and dadaist sculpture and collage, as well as delightful yet dark poetry, Oppenheim melds imagery with feeling and a sense of ill-fitting universality – of a common experience of malaise, curiosity, grief, and observation: the psychic tools of artists.
The establishment of a historical tradition is difficult to discern while practictioners are still actively crafting it. Recently, the idea of the contemporary in art seems to expand and extend past time-bound edges; it is more as though a technique loops back around over itself, makes new attempts at old practice; the artists working in collage today carry on this rich tradition, in discussion with past practitioners, deepening the field. It's a good day to be an artist when the past is well recorded.