Fragments: Collaging the Material World

The Chandler Art Gallery, Cambridge, MA — Fall 2019

This most recent exhibition occurred in the FALL of 2019 at the Chandler Art Gallery, part of the Maud Morgan Art Center located walking distance to Harvard University. The exhibition was to be an “Open Call” where people pay a small fee for submission of images for  consideration in the show. 

As the Curator and Juror, I got to pick who would be included in the exhibition. As someone who has been a working artist in this geographic area for many years, it was awkward to know and then reject peoples’ work that one knows personally and professionally. Somehow I chose mostly people who I did not know, and whose work I was attracted to and had never seen before. My choices for inclusion seemed to cluster around two very different poles: photographically based work that had a certain visual or verbal wryness, and then total abstraction where craft and unusual use of materials was arresting.

Here is the description of the exhibition for interested artists: 

We currently live in a world of fragments: of juxtaposing moments. Snippets of text, flashes of ideas and images tumble through the air and stream into ears, eyes and minds at a dizzying pace. Our time is broken into smaller and smaller increments with days of crowded schedules collaged into 24-hour increments.

Some artists naturally gravitate towards the collage process of cutting and pasting elements together to create new unities of meanings and order. Others turn to collage as a way to utilize collected ephemera and intriguing scraps that cannot possibly be thrown away. The process was modern with Picasso and Braque and has never gone away.

The Chandler Gallery invites artists to submit work that utilizes the process of collage as its primary medium.