Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Proximity, a group show about collage, re-contextualizing, and coming together. Co-curated by Lindsay Preston Zappas and Wilding Cran.
As we begin to move out of the pandemic, we are caught in a state of pulling our collective pieces back together, re-remembering how to operate as a society rather than as isolated individuals. In many ways, the practice of collage charts a similar terrain—within the logic of collage, one looks around to her immediate surroundings, not reinventing from scratch, but placing objects and images together with intention, creating a new and enlightened context. In this way, collage becomes an expansive term, one that celebrates a fluid and shifting ground as a means to explore new contexts and arrangements.
The artists in this show take up a wide variety of mediums—from textiles and sculpture to photography and work on paper. Some use collage in methodology more than practice; the simple abutting of two unexpected materials or the gesture of placing focused attention on objects that have been intentionally culled into proximity. Others opt for a maximal blending—pulling from their own internal lexicon of mark-making—stitching pattern, figure, and thread together into a singular plane. For many of the artists, flatness becomes a unifying strategy. By collapsing information, objects, frames, or patterns into a singular substrate, a certain merging takes place, re-situating an array of references into an altered field of vision.
Collage ultimately is a medium that creates connection from that which is already right in front of us; a poignant analogy as we begin to patchwork our communities back together. I’ve had many recent conversations about priorities and reassessing boundaries as things in our city begin to open back up. How might we move into our new reality while taking a clue from collage—being highly intentional with our movements through space rather than rushing back to a frenzied pre-pandemic normal. The methodology of collage models an accessible pathway forward—a way to imagine possibilities and futures by retooling what we already have.
–Lindsay Preston Zappas
Marwa Abdul-Rahman, Vikky Alexander, Yevgeniya Baras, Louis Cameron, Justin Chance, Chris Cran, Todd Gray, Elliott Hundley, February James, Heather McGill, Jason McLean, Paul Pescador, Jenny Rask, Paul Salveson, Fran Siegel, Evan Whale, Lindsay Preston Zappas and John Zane Zappas
