17″x11″; collage on watercolor paper; 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
WORKSHOP AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2024
Nous déchirons – A Workshop Celebrating the Art of the Rip and Tear
Saturday, 15 June 2024, 12:30-1:30PM
New Orleans Healing Center
Clive Knights and Janice McDonald
EVENT WEBSITE | REGISTER
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 12-16 June 2024. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
As an homage to the dance of paper fibers in articulate hands, two collage artists, whose work highlights the creative potential of ripping and tearing, will lead a workshop that challenges you to leave your scissors behind. Artists are invited to explore the range of visual and tactile outcomes possible when deploying only a rip/tear approach to preparing paper fragments for use in collage. Found images will be ripped in ways that bring the fibrous, irregular, and uneven play of edges to the fore, over and above the subject matter of the printed image. In practical exercises, participants will activate the full mobility of their hands and fingers with a wide variety of paper types to discover a diverse dialogue with the material. Collages created in the workshop will be collaborative and will aim to diminish the often-dominant presence of recognizable images, in favor of a focus on the interplay of the effects of ripping and tearing, of texture, of color, of layering, of relief, and of exposed fibers.
9″x7″; collage on paper; 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
ARTIST BIOS
Janice McDonald makes elegant, abstract collages from repurposed paper and packaging. She began to experiment with hand-made collage as a creative counterpoint to computer-based graphic design work. Janice prefers to work with un-identifiable, somewhat nebulous, imagery. The papers used in her collages are torn, rather than cut out, so any straight lines are the included edge of a piece of paper or a graphic element within the selected image. Recently she has explored adding marks, asemic writing, and fragments of text to her collage compositions. For over five years, McDonald has also maintained the daily practice of making a small collage in a diary. She participated in the Kolaj Institute’s first Poetry & Collage Residency and has been honored to present at Kolaj Fest New Orleans several times. Janice’s work has been widely exhibited and her collages find homes with individual collectors, in site-specific commissions, and in corporate collections. www.janicemcdonald.com and Instagram @janicemcdonaldart.
Clive Knights is a collagist, printmaker and creator of festival structures. Since 2021, he has had three solo shows of his collages and monotype prints in Portland, and solo shows at Sacripante Gallery in Rome, Italy and at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has exhibited work in over 35 group shows in multiple US states and overseas. In April 2022, he curated the international exhibition “Corporeal Gestures” in Portland which included over 100 collages by more than 100 artists from 22 countries. In June 2022, he published his first monograph covering work from the previous three years, Gestures from a Body at Work: Unsuccessful Attempts at Grasping Eternity. He was the founding director of the School of Architecture at Portland State University and his work is influenced by a career in architectural education, by studies in the phenomenology of the human body, and by a fascination with the potential for innovations of meaning embodied in poetic works. The artist, who lives and works in Portland, Oregon, is represented by gallerist Laura Vincent. www.cliveknights.com and Instagram @knightsclive.
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 12-16 June 2024. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.