Collage Party!

ART Toronto

by Vanessa Nicholas

This past week between Sunday March 9 and Wednesday March 12 Paul Butler hosted one of his famous collage parties at Toronto’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery as part of the University of Toronto’s annual Festival of the Arts. How I wish I could have been there!

Buter’s collage parties are modest events that usually takes place in gallery or studio spaces. Chairs, tables, tape, and magazines are provided and all are welcome to participate. The parties can last from a few hours to a few days and all resulting works are exhibited afterwards. Butler, who is from Winnipeg and graduated from The Alberta Collage of Art and Design in 1997, began hosting collage parties in 2002 after he began missing the concentrated and communal atmosphere of creativity that characterizes the art school experience. Though they began as casual events between friends, Butler’s concept quickly gained international popularity. Butler has hosted collage parties in London, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Oslo, and Dundee.

I imagine these events to be like group meditations. Canadian artist Cliff Eyland describes the parties as “many hands slapping, folding, creasing, and tearing…the prevailing mood is contemplative…[it is] a set of long, dreamy interludes of looking.”

Butler’s collages themselves reveal an interest in meditation and equate the collage process itself to a kind of redemption. They are often combinations of text and empty space or landscape scenes that give the viewer physical room to breathe. The untitled and undated work that is pictured above, for example, features a forest scene with the text “decisions, decisions, decisions” set against it. This combination of found natural imagery and provoking text embodies the type of refuge that the collage process can offer. “Decisions, decisions, decisions” describes a state of stressful sensory overload as well as the restorative act of making a collage. Magazines, newspapers, advertisements, junk mail, and pamphlets in many ways represent the clutter and stress of urban life that can make us feel claustrophobic and over stimulated. Collage prompts us to slow down and purposefully consider the minutia of everyday life. The challenge of selecting and compose images in a meaningful way encourages us to seek out beauty in a pro-active way.

Make sure to keep your eyes and ears open for Butler’s collage parties. In the meantime, serve your soul and start cutting and pasting!

A Beautiful Artifice at the Frick

ART New York


“A Beautiful Artifice” Charms Visitors of the Frick

"A Beautiful Artifice"
The Frick
1 East 70th Street
On view until April 27, 2008

by Val Bitici

As a New Yorker, I am blessed to be able to frequent and know well the great art museums in my city. With my tastes always fervently skewed towards Renaissance and Baroque art, I grew to love the Frick Collection soon after I was first allowed through its doors at the age of ten. With over a decade of monthly visits to the collection under my belt, I am often eager to see their special exhibitions. So when I heard that Parmigianino’s Antea was traveling on special loan from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples to New York, it was without question that I visit her.

Antea’s combination of loveliness and strangeness is a most alluringly unnerving juxtaposition. She stands life-sized at the center of the oval room at the Frick and captivates us from the moment we enter her space. The sitter, a young, fair and rosy-cheeked beauty, is all at once palpable and elusive. Her head is disproportionately smaller than her stocky, almost masculine body, and her right shoulder is jarringly broader than her left. Yet she shows no shame for her peculiar appearance. Draped in jewels and swathed in a fur stole and luxurious garments of gold satin and embroidered cloth, she is a vision of wealth forever setting her apart from the stark space that she inhabits. Her eerily candid stare informs us that she in not at all concerned with her own surroundings. As her left hand absent-mindedly fumbles with the gold chain around her neck, Antea’s gaze peers beyond the threshold of her own space and into ours. With this, the line between reality and idealism wavers between stringency and ambiguity. The sitter’s identity is unknown and mysterious, yet her regal demeanor gives her an unmistakably earned presence. Parmigianino has painted her as an ideal vision of beauty and strength. Hence Antea, as the curator of the show has described her, is an “artifice.” She is the enigmatic archetype of an ethereal beauty, obtainable only through this painted masterpiece and isolated from all that we know.