Worth A Look: North Star Collage 3

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"Worth a Look" is a series of semi-regular essays about excellent art, interesting ideas, and whatever other cool stuff we find around town. Go see art; it's good for you.

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Banner image: Rhiannon Davis, Be good! (detail), 2024. Magazines, recycled material, 11 x 8.5". All images courtesy of Twin Cities Collage Collective, unless otherwise noted.

 

There’s a reel going around on Instagram right now (shout-out to MPLSART head honcho Blaine Garrett for sending it my way) about a Depression-era photo editor, Roy Stryker. Stryker worked for the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and hired photographers to document the lives of rural Americans. During his time at the FSA, the agency produced some 77,000 photos for distribution to the press and public, telling the story of Dust Bowl poverty and the need for New Deal policy. He is also the man who, armed with only a hole punch, personally destroyed thousands of his photographers' images.

"Destroyed" is not exactly the right word (unless you ask those photographers), but he certainly rendered them unpublishable, punching big black holes out of candid shots of smiling farm children, unassuming bricklayers, barren landscapes, and a thousand other scenes of everyday American life. According to photographer Zach Dobson, who created the Instagram reel, Stryker’s purpose was to carefully curate the images put out by the FSA so that only the ones calculated to inspire pity and pathos made their way into print. (Think Dorothea Lange’s famous shot of a worried mother, for example.) With his hole punch, he sought to compromise all of the film negatives that appeared subpar or off-message. It’s a shame nobody bothered to suggest he just use a grease pencil, and by the time he heeded the complaints of his outraged photographers, it was too late.

 

Images from the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress.

 

In the destruction, he added another layer of historical narrative to the images, forever marrying these real life scenes with the art direction of their government. It’s a form of propaganda that tells on itself, telegraphing its values both through what it shows and what it hides. And with the intervention of one man — Stryker, a hapless black-and-white Baldessari of sorts — some of the images now hum at an even higher frequency. Such is the power of the cut picture.

This week a lot of you may not be able to make it out to see any art in person — maybe you're out of town for the holidays, maybe you're too busy "entertaining" family, or maybe, at the end of a long year, you're just not in the mood to put on pants and look for parking. Thankfully, Twin Cities Collage Collective has you covered with an online exhibition you can enjoy right from the couch.

 

allison anne, spring is coming with a strawberry in the mouth, 2024.  Handcut paper collage on cardstock, 7 x 5"

 

TCCC is spearheaded by artist allison anne, who has worked hard over the past few years to foster and platform the collage community, including by producing a series of gorgeous books called North Star Collage. North Star Collage's third iteration, fittingly, takes three forms: (1) as a printed book available to order, (2) as an in-person exhibition at The Boiler Room Coffee Co. in Stevens Square through December 31, and (3) as an online exhibition, featuring almost entirely different works from what's in the print edition, along with pieces from a few extra artists to boot. That's three distinctly different celebrations of Minnesota-based collage that, it should be noted, were organized, built, and published with polish entirely by allison anne, whose passion for this project shines through in the care with which it is presented. I recommend seeking out the show and the book (I had the honor of having work in their first and second issues), but for now, hunkered down for the holidays, we’re gonna stick with the jpegs.

The online gallery is set up so you can experience each image individually alongside the artist’s statement and social media links, smartly allowing you to get more insight immediately on works you respond to. The first one that stops my cursor from clicking is Ben DiNino’s Contort Yourself, a hand-cut portrait of a seven-limbed model perched impossibly on two chairs at once. Removing one figure’s face — unlike with Stryker’s empty voids — reveals another neck underneath, while mirrored and tangled torsos and legs are made all the more confusing by the empty, unaltered backdrop of a dirty white wall and scuffed up floorboards. It's a simple, complicated image that invites deciphering.

 

Ben DiNino, Contort Yourself, 2024. Collaged paper, 10.5 x 8.75"

 

But don't stop there; keep clicking. There are lots to get through, with over 150 works in the gallery. Collage artists (in my experience being one) are hoarders at heart, and the breadth of source material that has been sliced, scissored, glued, lassoed, and pasted in this collection goes to show just how much source material there is in the world. I remember the surprise of going through my own stack of National Geographics looking for photos to cut up and actually recognizing elements that had already appeared in Winston Smith's collages in the 1980s, discovering them suddenly in their original state. The question then became, "but what could I do with it?" Just as with tubes of paint or a set of pencils, no two artists, given the same stack of magazines, would ever produce the same collage.

Some aesthetic genres do emerge within the North Star Collage collection, most notably abstraction, usually formulated with odd snippets of texture and color, and surrealism, which of course develops quite naturally when images start mashing and melding with one another. Mark Twain is supposed to have said that of course truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. But collage is under no such obligation.

 

Top: Derek Meier, In Memoriam, 2023. Mixed media collage on analog photograph, 4 x 4". Middle: Aedric Donovan & Rachel Robison, Home Movies, 2024. Paper & digital collage, 7 x 3". Bottom: Nell Pierce, The Whole Truth (detail), 2022. Cut-up magazine on acrylic-painted wood, 48 x 60"

 

The abstractionists here include some real stand-outs, like Derek Meier’s mixed media polaroid; Jen Shaffer’s attention to rich, vintage colors; and Michael Smith’s almost geological layering of weathered, hand-painted paper. Some folks go beyond paper and scissors to achieve surprising results through unconventional methods, like Rachel Robinson & Aedric Donovan’s collaborative piece channeling electrical current through pieces of film in a darkroom. The result is a strange sort of hairy geometry, inky and spooky against jagged blocks of hard white nothingness.

A variety of other studio practices show up, as well. Mac Jones’s double-exposure gives us a seemingly in-camera collage of Kubrickian interiors. Emily Walley’s acrylic painting contains no physical collage at all, opting instead to chop up only the image of a precariously stacked rock, pinecone, and glass dish. And E Holt’s source material sits in low relief like an assemblage, creating a little devotional offering of twisted text and scraps of leather binding from a 250-year-old book. On the other end of the size spectrum, Jessica Kitzman offers up a three foot by four foot curved quilt as her entry, and here the difference between online and in-person exhibitions becomes most prominent: the scales are all equalized. Nell Pierce’s piece in the show clocks in at four by five feet, but it is shown at the same size as Meier's 4 x 4" polaroid. If you zoom in on your browser, though, you can start to make out the astounding amount of detail that Pierce has packed into every square inch. (As you might expect, they’re even better in person.)

 

Top: Mac Jones, Hall, 2023. Mixed media, 20 x 16". Middle: Matt Schuster, The Price of Hope, 2024. Digital collage, 12 x 9". Bottom: Genie Hien Tran, Am Phu, 2023. Mixed media, 30 x 22"

 

You’ll find great examples of visual storytelling (Genie Hien Tran and Juan Diego Perez la Cruz stand out in this regard) and digital experimentation (Emily McBride and Matt Schuster, who relates Photoshop filters to classic Xerox zine-making) and scads of work crashing every kind of image you can imagine together: hot dogs, pornography, old fiddlers, high fashion. You name it, we’ve cut it. It’s this archival recycling that gives collage its charge, whether in the service of social criticism, mystical exploration, analog nostalgia, or simply the pursuit of a pleasing image, no matter how many other images faced destruction to get there.

I always wondered what the Nat Geo photographers would think of the butchery their pictures suffered at my scissors, just as Roy Stryker’s colleagues bemoaned the accidental Dada inflicted by his hole punch. It’s something to consider as social media platforms feed our own precious content straight into their AI learning models — what does ownership and authorship of an image actually look like? Is a slice or a rip or a punch transformative enough to make something your own? And what does the way we cut and paste old culture reveal about the context of here and now? Too many questions for a holiday break, I know; this was just supposed to be a fun read for Christmas. My advice is pull up the exhibition, give it a look, and see what grabs you. If you're still feeling adventurous, head over to the Library of Congress, and watch Stryker's spooky black dot jump from picture to picture (just search for "hole punch" to find them). Or better yet: everybody grab a gluestick and start chopping up that stack of Christmas cards. ◼︎ 

 

Denise Clemen, Motherhood #1, 2023. Analog collage with handmade paper, magazine and catalog pages, produce netting, and gel pen on wooden panel, 10 x 8"

 

North Star Collage 3 is on view online via Twin Cities Collage Collective. The printed book is available to order online and to buy at Burl Gallery, Love Token Vintage & Handmade, and The Boiler Room Coffee Co, where an exhibition of works is on view through December 31.

You can follow TCCC on Instagram @twincitiescollagecollective.