Layered Meanings

Artists across disciplines, mediums, and traditions have used various techniques of combining materials to explore new artistic possibilities for hundreds of years. When materials are removed from their original source, they take on new meanings when placed in the context of other objects or images. The introduction of mass produced media such as chromolithographs and photographs began a trend of extracting and recombining diverse images into one composition in order to explore personal, aesthetic, and sometimes political themes. Collage traditions continue today as a means to explore the potency of combining diverse images and ideas. Layered Meanings includes works ranging from the Pop art movement of the 1960s to the present.

This exhibition explores various methods of layering imagery and materials to create new possibilities and new realities. Often artists will reassemble everyday objects such as magazine cutouts or scrap paper to create works of art that are fresh, yet familiar. The three techniques utilized by artists in this exhibition include:

Collage: Collage is both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and/or other ephemera are arranged and adhered to a supporting surface.

Assemblage: Assemblage is a three-dimensional collage, made by assembling a variety of elements– often everyday objects scavenged or purchased by the artists.

Montage: A montage is an assembly of images that relate to each other in some way to create a single unified composition.

Constructing a unified work from existing materials involves bringing that material’s past associations into a renewed interpretation. Artists in Layered Meanings use various collage techniques to explore the landscape, the mind and body, abstraction, and the personal versus the universal. The works in Layered Meanings honor the artistic possibilities within the mundane; they invite the viewer to consider the expressive potential of the everyday imagery and objects that surround us.