THE WEEKENDER 14 | 2023
Collage News & Inspiration
HELLO EVERYONE,
As most but not all of you already know, hashtags still aren’t working properly on Instagram. No one really knows if this is a weird and extreme version of shadow banning to fight spam, or a way to push people to use reels instead of stills. Be that as it may, as a result of collages disappearing from the hashtag feed, PCC ended up being accused of not only censorship but also of being motivated to do so by some weird form of anti-feminism and therefore contributing to gender inequality. The misunderstanding has since been resolved but I still want to use this opportunity to address, explain and answer a few issues and questions that come up very, very rarely, and that some of the people who joined this community only recently might not know about yet.
This is a gentle reminder that:
- PCC was founded and is run by a woman. And while I got tons of support from both men and women over the years, thank you guys, every single person that got involved in one of our projects over the years, to organize events, host workshops, proofread one of our publications, etc. happened to be female too.
- PCC was founded and is run by one (1) woman. While I get tons of support with certain projects, the Instagram accounts, website, newsletter, all publications and all communications are handled by me and me alone.
- PCC gets updated once (1) a day, every day, all year long – unless I’m sick or have an emergency to attend to or have no internet access – not twice a day, or three times a day, or every hour, or the moment someone posts something.
- PCC gets hundreds of challenge submission, comments, Instagram direct messages and emails a day. While I check and respond to IG direct messages every day, also only once (1), I do have a backlog of emails to attend to (I do keep an eye open for collage emergency emails, whatever they may be) and I cannot always read all the comments.
- PCC complies with Instagram’s rules, not because I necessarily agree with all of them but because fighting social media hypocrisy, while worthwhile, isn’t the aim of this community.
- PCC tries to share everything created for one of its weekly challenges, on average three collages per day on the feed (anything more at the same time and IG may flag it as spam), everything else to stories. That said, hashtags haven’t been working properly for a long time, thanks to IG’s weird algorithm sorting the hashtag feed by most recent publications doesn’t work well either, and accounts do get shadow-banned all the time, meaning, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, their images don’t show up at all under the hashtags they are using. People also use the #pariscollageclub hashtag for all kinds of collages and images so I have to look at everything to find the collages that really were made for the challenge. Needless to say, sometimes I miss things.
- PCC does not own or control any of the hashtags in use by our community (#pariscollagecollective, #pariscollageclub & #pariscollagecollective_ultd). For those of you who don’t know how Instagram works, I cannot remove hashtags from a post nor specific posts from a hashtag feed, or ban anyone from using any of those hashtags.
- PCC respects your privacy settings. A surprisingly large number of people seem to forget that they themselves disabled re-sharing to stories or tagging.
To make a long story (or rather list) short, if your collages go unacknowledged repeatedly or for several days (not minutes or hours), many different things could be going wrong, and I ask you, not for the first time, to please reach out to let me know. A lot of you do this already (often very apologetically, which is totally unnecessary). I will respond to almost everything as soon as I can, everything else eventually, and a few things not at all because they simply got lost somewhere along the way.
Everyone who handles large amounts of messages on a daily basis will know what I’m talking about. It’s the phone call you get the moment you open a message or email (or your bunnies, cats, dogs, kids, please insert disturbance of your choice, that decided they need your full attention right away or they burn down the house) and when you get back to your computer half an hour later, ten new emails or messages will have come in but you’ve completely forgotten the last one that is now no longer marked as unread and therefore literally stops existing…
If this happens, if your collage doesn’t show up in the #pariscollageclub hashtag feed, or if I don’t respond to your messages, or acknowledge you collages posted on IG as quickly as what seems reasonable to possibly only you, you’re of course free to jump to whatever conclusion you want – or you can give me the benefit of the doubt and wait a little and then reach out again.
Thank you 😊
And now the latest collage news and inspiration.
Enjoy!
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NEWS
Most of the students in Tucker’s “Art in Public Spaces” course are not art majors, he said. He jokes that he’s especially grateful a dental student took that class.
“I’d rather have my cosmetic dental work done by a student who now can see rather than someone who just has eyes,” he said, with a laugh.
Tucker, art director for the university’s Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts program, currently teaches 17 students who are working on a collage made from hundreds of small photos being turned into a mural - Tabasco labels, mundane objects part of new mural at University of Michigan - via mlive
In some ways the installation is an anomaly: it does not look much like other works in the show. Yet it embodies two strains long explored by this under-the-radar artist: on the one hand, experimenting with craft mediums such as ceramic and glass to represent a haptic experience of the (mostly female) body in vessel-like shapes; and on the other, asserting her ties to a personal New England history via collaged materials. Her late father left behind a trove of antique almanacs, maps, and charts that she scans and cuts up, interspersing the pieces (as she does throughout her many collages) with gouache, charcoal, ink and/or metallic foil. These are elegant images that vault through time and place, from chakras and littorals to astrological signs and defunct alphabets - Witches Take Over Westchester - Bowen’s multimedia art is an alchemical mix of the sensuous and arcane, and it is more than a little witchy - via Hyperallergic
The mixed media art and collage enthusiast centers her creativity around the empowerment of African and Black women as we continue to make strides toward true freedom. Navigating a patriarchal system and ultimately strengthening their capacity to grant resilience and joy to the world around them, Chimutuwah's artistic depictions of the female form offer a hopeful glimpse into a bright, woman-centric future - Prudence Chimutuwah Is Narrating The Rise of the 21st-Century Woman - via okayafrica
Bold Women: Jessie Wilber, innovator and inspiration - via Montana Public Radio
Check out Bourbon with Heart, Kentucky’s first & only arts-focused Bourbon charity. Their current Bow-Tied Together exhibition features lots of collage art.
PCC: The catalogue for our Rachid Taha Open Call is finally, finally out and available here
PCC: A selection of challenge submissions from last week is up on our website and can be seen here, the image prompt for next week is available to download here
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY - OLD & NEW
Sean M. Foster
Sean's work draws from many sources. Nature, family, what it means to be working class in modern America, and the struggle to hold onto a sense of play as he enters his middle years. Appalachia, her people, her love of myth, and her sense of hard work are the well he often draws from when writing. More here
Geoff Litchfield
The first collage artists that engaged me were Raoul Hausmann (“The Art Critic”), Picasso, Schwitters and Peter Blake. I think the first collage I remember completing was around the age of fourteen or fifteen. During my Fine Art degree my work became quite conceptual, featuring installation and photography but I found that, in subsequent years, I kept returning to collage as a medium. In the mid 80’s, I found that alongside conceptual-based interventions, collage answered many of my concerns as an artist. In my various roles in education, I also found that collage was a great “leveller”, in that it allowed participants to rid themselves of their fears of inadequacy regarding drawing skills and express ideas and explore artistic concepts more freely. For myself, I found that I was able to explore recurring themes of linear and non-linear narrative, the relationship between image and text, political and societal issues, and the inclusion of chance techniques and accidental interventions. In addition, collage as a medium readily made room for fun and play to have their place in the creative process. More here
Anja Giese
Building on my experience as an art director and graphic designer my fine art works explore the abstraction of storytelling and communication. My main form of expression lies in relief printmaking. I use it to loosely layer informations into print collages, combine elements to dissolve their initial meaning and create something new. Some of my works get painted over and some receive further layers with classical collage elements. My digital works push this idea of print collage further and serve as my playground for experimental work. More here
Alex Asche
My name is Alex, short for Alexandra. I always enjoyed sparking creativity amongst my circle of friends and family through (often self-invented) games or crafts. During the pandemic, I started to create analog collages out of magazines and started to involve more and more people over time to share the experience. As Albert Einstein said ”Creativity is intelligence having fun!”. Ultimately, after many many collages, I founded Glueclub Zurich, a group and concept to connect likeminded people to be creative (whilst doing collages). A lot of my work is very colorful, and each collage tells a story. I hope my collages inspire your own creativity! More here
If you have any news about exhibitions, publications or events you want so share with the community, please send an email with all relevant information and at least one link to a website or venue to: hello@pariscollagecollective.com
Your work is GREAT and you have my greatest support. Communities don’t match well with misconducted ego issues.
Forza, Donna 💪🤘