Surgical Experiments in the Medium of Collage
/"In my work, I tend to explore the potential of collage outside of the 'cut and paste' limitations. I like to push the boundaries to see how much texture and layering I can fit into one piece without actually needing to glue anything down. This may involve weaving, cutting and intertwining and on occasion a little assistance from artist tape behind the scenes. As part of the nature of this process, I have worked in aspects of the collages that are non-static, that are intentionally free to move about the piece within the enclosed environment provided. This creates a new dimension where the collage work can take on a life of its own."
— Irena Azovsky
IRENA AZOVSKY, UNTITLED, 2017, DIGITAL COLLAGE WITH CUT OUTS, GLITTER, ACETATE, SHARPIE, AND DIGITAL SCANNER, 9 X 9 IN.
SURGICAL EXPERIMENTS IN THE MEDIUM OF COLLAGE
Carolina Magis Weinberg and Christopher Squier
The collage is hands-on in many senses. It displays imagery of hands, is bent and folded by hands, pressed up against by hands, and covers over hands. It also shakes under the weight of hands, mobilized and redistributed so that its elements—glitter, paper slivers, and spear-like triangles—are tossed around, battered, and displaced. We can think about the structure of the collage as composed from the forms of the body, but dissected, severed, and disconnected from their joints.
The eye, the eye, the eye, the eye. The grid, the grid, the grid, the grid. Cutting the eye open with an exacto knife, held by the fingertips, reveals the paper eye is mere representation. Behind the eye there is glitter; beyond the glitter is pattern; beyond the pattern are lines. We see a hand which grasps, fingers pressed against the scanner’s surface. Touched touch. The kind of touch that smudges and makes glossy surfaces greasy.
The collage, then, is in an invasive state of disrepair.
Marcel Duchamp theorizes the infra-thin, a way to measure the width of a sheet of paper. It is infinitely thin, a non-space between two sides: the warmth left behind by someone who has just vacated their seat, the reminiscence of smoke on someone’s breath after a cigarette. Presence lingers in the infra-thin. This meticulous process of collage has returned the paper to its beingness, its body given back. Here is some form of infra-thickness to wrestle with Duchamp.
The collage is made and remade through its continual changes, expertly navigating new outlines, representing itself in novel iterations. Its body is a free-floating structure, with each piece sutured to another. It is a cadaver laid out for medical dissection. When we touch the collage, our hands become forceps and scalpel. When we recombine, do we hope for some form of revival of the original?
A constant, a distant, a blur.
Its skin is barely present, a transparency—acetate—that we see straight through. Our hands maneuver: pushing, pulling, putting the body into kaleidoscopic new forms.
Cut.
Irena Azovsky currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, after moving to the West Coast from Brooklyn, NY. She was born in Moscow, Russia and previously resided in Tel Aviv, Israel before moving to the States at the age of nine. She attended Maryland Institute College of Art, where she received a BFA in General Fine Arts with a concentration in Book Arts. She uses collage as her medium to create multidimensional interwoven pieces that bring forth her fondness of '80s culture and imagery.
Carolina Magis Weinberg is an artist and writer of site and sight, a whether reporter, and an activist of the minute. She carries water, words, colors, and histories looking for sites of dislocation and possibilities of relocation by asking the map, the un-painted landscape, the deflated balloons, and the found colors to behave otherwise. In her writing she considers the materiality of language, the duplicity of the accent, and the possibilities of the poetic. Her work is parenthetically located before the initial capital letter of a sentence, and after the final period.
Christopher Squier is an artist and curator living in San Francisco. He is a Dissolve editor, SFAI graduate, and currently serves as Programs Director at Embark Arts.
