A Boom curated show featuring the medium Collage. Collage is an art form of assemblage, often relying on the intricately hand cut, with found materials commonly used. This group exhibition has three artists exploring this medium in unique and varied ways – local artist Dylan Foley, French artist Julien Pacaudand Munich based artist Claude Jones.
Dylan Foley is an Artist and Curator from Ocean Grove. Her artistic practice currently focuses on re-purposing (and re-imagining) found imagery through the medium of collage. Dylan’s collages evoke a sense of humour and quirkiness, transforming lost and forgotten relics into something new. For Collage Makers she has created a series of works using imagery from vintage magazines and gardening books collected over time. ”
“As far as I am concerned, the very nature of collage is one of serendipity and chance. The context and content of work relies so heavily on what you can find in the source material and then in turn, how you use it. Flexibility and creativity is put to the test time and time again. It is a challenging medium in that sense but also one with such great potential for strange and wonderful artworks.”
These collages continue an ongoing interest in the aesthetics of 1950s and 1960s printed advertising, coupled with beautiful illustrations of plants and flowers. In isolating certain aspects of the found images, new relationships and meanings are formed. These works are intended to make you smile, they don’t take themselves too seriously and will hopefully conjure a mix of wonder, whimsy and nostalgia.
Julien Pacaud is a French artist and illustrator, living and working in Paris. Before becoming a digital collage artist, he was, by turns – an astrophysician, a snooker player, a hypnotist and an esperanto teacher. Pacaud works with old found photos that he digitally manipulates, he finds that this process allows more possibilities in creating dynamic compositions. He likes to create collisions of imagery, striving to make disparate elements to coexist, to create ambiguity about the nature of the artworks – a doubt about the medium, the time, the space and the meaning.
Claude Jones has been a finalist in numerous art awards, winning the “Its Liquid” International Art Prize in 2012, and the Moreton Bay Art Prize in 2011. She has undertaken 6 international artist residency programs, has received several grants and scholarships and has exhibited widely. Her works are represented in many public and private collections. Originally from Zealand, the artist currently divides her time between Sydney, where she teaches printmaking at The National Art School and her home studio in Munich where she lives with her Texan husband and their Australian cat.
Claude is a plant-eating pacifist who strongly believes in the need to emancipate all innocent beings. Her art is often a form of quiet activism.
“My art is inspired by a conviction in the need to re-assess our problematic relationship with animals, to consider their sentience and to approach more ethical ways of co-existing with them. To this end, my work focuses on the creation of anthropomorphised figures in ironic narratives that examine our complex relationships with other animals.
The animal characters in my work, are sourced from copyright – free vintage illustration books, and are digitally manipulated and printed onto acid free paper before they are applied to the final work. I frequently use pre-photography, vintage animal illustrations, as they are already somewhat anthropomorphised, reflecting the illustrator’s subjective vision and style and expressing the individuality of each animal character. This is important to me, as animals are indeed individuals with unique personalities, as my cat Laksa can attest to.
Whilst the subject matter may have disturbing implications, I employ soft colours and collaged decorative papers that belie the sinister narrative content of the work – in the same way that the sordid underbelly of ‘legitimate’ mistreatment and exploitation of animals is so often repressed and sugarcoated.”
Collage Makers / 17 Aug – 9 Sept
view catalogue here