Kolaj Magazine is obviously biased when it comes to collage, but we also know that collage is something of a bastard medium in the grand art world: institutionally lost between mixed media and works-on-paper. So it’s nice when a collage artist gets some love.
Actually, collage has been getting a lot of love in the past few years. John Stezaker won the 2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Jason De Haan was shortlisted for the 2012 Sobey Art Award which Daniel Barrow won in 2010. Maggie Groat’s collage book took the 2012 Art Book of the Moment, the annual competition held by the Art Gallery of York University. In 2013, Raven Skye McDonough was named Florida Artist of the Year by Twin Cities TOSCA Arts & Culture Magazine.
Laure Prouvost took the mother of all art awards, the Turner Prize, in 2013. This winter, the New Museum presented her first US solo exhibition which featured a new work that includes a semicircular collaged mural, a multichannel video installation, scattered sculptural elements, and a film. “Centering on the problems as well as the possibilities of memory and forgetting, the piece addresses the arbitrary distinctions that can be ascribed to power and possession,” wrote curator Margot Norton. “For Forgetting expands Prouvost’s multilayered investigation of the slippages between systems of communication, and conjures diverse interpretations dependent on how one perceives or remembers the story.”
In March, The Dutch photography museum Foam announced that American artist Daniel Gordon won the Foam Paul Huf Award 2014. This annual prize, given to a photographer under age 35, consists of €20,000 and an exhibition at the museum.
Gordon creates colourful sculptures out of torn paper and photographs the results to make brilliant still lifes. “He calls our attention to the surface of the paper, emphatically challenging the notion of a photograph as a window into the world,” wrote Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Museum of Modern Art, in Gordon’s 2013 photobook Still Lifes, Portraits & Parts. “The imperfections visible in his constructions are the antithesis of the glossy perfection of so much photography today. Instead he shares an affinity with painters or sculptors – those that spend time making things in the studio.”
The international jury for the 2014 Paul Huf Award was made up of Kathy Ryan, the Director of Photography at The New York Times Magazine; Stefano Stoll, Director of the IMAGES Festival in Vevey, Switzerland; Hans Gremmen, a graphic designer based in Amsterdam; Andrea Holzherr, Exhibitions & Cultural Development Manager at Magnum Photos in Paris; and Christopher McCall, Director of Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco.
“We voted unanimously for the winner Daniel Gordon, whose work draws from the classical genres of still life and portraiture explored in the main movements of modern art.” said the statement released by the jury. “Coming from a generation that is comfortable using pictures from the internet, Gordon finds a unique way of reconstructing found imagery into 3-dimensional collages, which he then photographs. We are delighted to recognize this highly original and colourful work. He thoroughly deserves his place in the company of former Foam Paul Huf Award winners, which is fast becoming a who’s who of contemporary photographic practice.”
While we at Kolaj Magazine will recognize Gordon as a collage artist who works in photography as opposed to being a photographer who works with collage, as the jury sees him, on behalf of the medium, we will file this accolade as a win.
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Image (top):
Ratatouille and Smoke Bush
by ©Daniel Gordon
60″x70″
C-print
2014
Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, New York
Image (centre):
For Forgetting (installation view)
by Laure Prouvost
2014
Courtsey of The New Museum, New York
Photo: Benoit Pailley
Image (bottom):
Lemons
by ©Daniel Gordon
7″x9″
C-print
2013
Edition of 3 and 1 Artist Proof
Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, New York