THE WEEKENDER 18 | 2023
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.”
― Chuck Close
The latest collage news and inspiration!
Enjoy!
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NEWS
The first ever PCC exhibition - Hom(m)age to Rachid Taha - opens next Tuesday. Since most of you wont be able to visit, we’ll be taking lots of pictures, so keep your eyes peeled. The vernissage and actual homage will take place next Thursday at 6:30 p.m.
The change from men in suits to women in jeans, from academic portraits in oils to a maverick collage, can be charted in the Australian Cultural Data Engine’s handy Archibald Prize database, which shows the many changes over the years, from the nature of the sitters, the age and genders of the winners, increases of the prize money and even the palette used by the artists - As Julia Gutman’s maverick collage wins the Archibald prize, the award is truly in the hands of a new generation - via The Conversation
Through a blend of prose, illustration, and collage, visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger explores issues of inequity and social injustice. Her work—both fiction and nonfiction—has appeared in gallery shows and publications such as the Guardian, the Atlantic’s CityLab, and more. Her first book, American Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History, is out today from Balzer + Bray. PW spoke with Aberg-Riger about her nonlinear approach to American history and her decision to write for a teen audience - Four Questions for Ariel Aberg-Riger - via Publisher’s Weekly
Collage exhibition by yours truly PCC founder Petra Zehner - A CONTRESENS - at Les Passantes: May 10 to June 10, 2023 - vernissage Wednesday, May 10, 2023 at 6:30 p.m. - please come and say hi
Thomas Kong, an artist who made whimsical, joyous collages cannily composed of food packaging, plastic bags and other material scraps, often sourced from the convenience store he operated in Chicago for 17 years, died on 1 May. He was 73 - Thomas Kong, who transformed a Chicago convenience store into an art environment, has died - via The Art Newspaper
Memoirs usually focus on what the writer remembers. Mari Naomi’s “I Thought You Loved Me” is instead about what the creator has forgotten or didn’t know in the first place. The book uses a barrage of techniques — scrapbook, comics, collage, reprinted letters, text — to fill the page and fill in the past. You might think the array of forms would give you a more kaleidoscopic view of the author’s history, relationships and life. But instead, the different modes tend to cancel one another out or interfere with one another, leaving the reader only more aware of gaps and erasures - They were once inseparable: A defiantly odd graphic memoir seeks a lost best friend - via Los Angeles Times
PCC: The catalogue for our Rachid Taha Open Call & Exhibition is 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
Mixta
I make stuff. I get just as inspired by nature as i do new york city (i live not too far away). For collage, I look for connections between images and ideas and put them together. I keep it real simple, just go with the flow and not think too much, and work kinda quickly, that helps stay in the flow. I look forward to learning more and making more. The work from the other artists in Paris Art Collective is super-inspiring and is a great motivator to bring ideas to life. More here
Ryota Matsumoto
Matsumoto’s work reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving urban and ecological milieus, which could be attributed to a multitude of spatio-temporal phenomena influenced by social, economic, and cultural assemblages. They are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures, and ecosystems in the transient nature of constantly shifting topography and geology.
There is a common thread with regard to visual abstraction in his artworks: the multiplicity of hybrid objects that unfold within their own spatiotemporal coordinates of phase space and are transcribed to an image plane. In that regard, his creative process of drawing henceforth can be defined as the swirls of virtual intensities that are reconfigured as the cartography of spatiotemporal reality. More here
Viviane Frangie
Viviane Frangie was born in Mexico City (1975). She's an architect by trade, but a true artist at heart. Now she lives in Cancun, a place where she finds inspiration daily.
Her love for art began at a young age, as she explored a variety of art classes to enhance her skills and explore different techniques. However, it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that she discovered the beauty of collage making. This has now become one of her favorite forms of expression, mixing different media allows her to produce distinctive works that captivate the senses while conveying unique messages through every stroke or pixel used in its creation. More here
Ut Barley
Ut Barley’s collages are an ode to feminine power and to our connection with nature, which she sees as a fairy tale-like diary.
Over the years, she has experimented with a blend of various different techniques for her analog collage: writing, embroidery, painting (watercolour, oil pastel, gouache)...& also plants and flowers which she finds in nature.
Influenced by mythologies, Ut Barley’s collages are like illustrated fairy tales: changing bodies which transmute with their environments to reveal changing emotions, sometimes contradictory ones and which are concealed within each and every one of us. Her characters and imaginary worlds translate into the visual expression of a feeling, a state, a vision or a sensation... Through her enchanted immersions, she conjures the turmoil which are the direct consequences of a growing oppression, the consequences of our emotions on our civilization, the environment and the spirituality of our ancestors. 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
It’s been a long dry haul waiting for inspiration to kick-start me. I don’t think it’s coming by waiting 🥴