OAKLAND UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(248) 370-3005
Department of Art & Art History
College of Arts and Sciences
208 Wilson Hall, Oakland University
Rochester, MI 48309
www.oakland.edu/ouag
BORDERS AND FRONTIERS:
COLLAGE AND APPROPRIATION IN THE CONTEMPORARY IMAGE
March 5 - April 10, 2011
Opening reception, Saturday, March 5, 5-8:00PM
Jonathan Allen
Michael Anderson
Matthew Cusick
Chambliss Giobbi
Collage artists appropriate from their surroundings; their cut-and-pasted forms become the reflexive visual record of their time.
Borders and Frontiers presents artists with a specialized appetite for the digital and contemporary and, at the same time, an absorption with the image bank of the past, and, in doing so they build a bridge between history, the contextual present, and a conjectural
tomorrow. Using the notion of “borders and frontiers” as a metaphor for the democratization of imagery and the collaging of reconfigured pictorial forms in a global context, this exhibition explores the cultural significance of the reproduced and repurposed image.
David LaChapelle
George Rahme
Holli Schorno
Maritta Tapanainen
Mark Wagner
Contemporary collage in 2011 demonstrates a diverse array of practices; Borders and Frontiers brings together nine artists:
six from New York, one from Detroit, and two from Los Angeles. David LaChapelle, the defining American portrait and tableau
photographer of his generation, creates an immediate and palpable short-cut to his photographs in his new collages, which he
cuts and reassembles. Chambliss Giobbi similarly collages his photographs – the ones he takes of his sitters specifically to be
torn and reassembled in his unique multiple viewpoint portraits. Michael Anderson hijacks the semiotics of images and creates
what he calls 3rd-wave-abstraction from found street posters. Like Anderson, George Rahme and Jonathan Allen riff from a
variety of lens-based images but their sources are diverse: posters, reproductions, magazines and more. Holli Schorno and
Maritta Tapanainen assemble intricate collages from technical illustrations. Matthew Cusick renders cars from deconstructed
roadmaps. These artists are connoisseurs, each amassing archives of material; Mark Wagner, for example, has an archive of
dollar bills which he dissects, deconstructs, and repurposes in his painstaking constructed collages. Some of the artists share
common goals, others are divergent, but all work to advance a means of expression that emancipates a direct approach to
composing the pictorial via the repurposing of the extant. Their work is all encompassing, culturally rich and confronts assumptions about the present, the popular, and the future of pictorial art. Absorbed by the interlocking assimilation of media and ideas,
they are pluralistic visionaries and visual collaborators. This exhibition is accompanied by a sixty-page full color catalogue.
PANEL DISCUSSION: Sunday, March 6 @ noon: Reconstructing the Pictorial
with Jonathan Allen, Michael Anderson, Chambliss Giobbi, George Rahme
ARTIST’S TALK: Monday, March 7 @ 5PM: Michael Anderson:
Collage, 3rd-Wave Abstraction and the Contemporary Image
Jonathan Allen, Courtesy Lu Magnus; Michael Anderson, Courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery; Chambliss Giobbi, Courtesy of The Butcher’s Daughter; David LaChapelle,
George Rahme, Courtesy of Fred Torres Collaborations; Matthew Cusick, Holli Schorno, Maritta Tapanainen & Mark Wagner Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Gallery
Open every day noon to 5pm, closed Mondays; open evenings during theatre performances. All events are free. The gallery
is next to Meadow Brook Theatre, on the Oakland University campus, exit # 79 off I-75. If images are required for publication
contact [email protected]. OUAG is supported in part by a grant from The Kresge Foundation. and the Michigan Council for
Arts and Cultural Affairs.