19″x13″; paper collage on paper; 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
SYMPOSIUM AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2024
Time & Fragmentation: Collage Theories
Friday, 14 June 2024, 1-1:45PM
Cafe Istanbul
Joe Bertino & Clive Knights
ROUNDTABLE AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2024
Passing Time in Collage
Friday, 14 June 2024, 2-3PM
New Orleans Healing Center
Joe Bertino
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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.
In the symposium, Time & Fragmentation: Collage Theories, Joe Bertino and Clive Knights explore ideas about how we think about collage, its creation, and its role in society.
One challenge of working with collage is the acquisition of source material about a particular subject. This is especially relevant when the artist wishes to portray a subject’s evolution or change, for instance the passage of time and its effects on the subject. Were the artist working in Paint, they could easily reproduce the subject at will and render it undergoing direct transformation. But how may we express change or the passing of time in collage, where we are limited in the source material that represents a subject? In what ways can we innovate technically to portray themes of evolution while maintaining a consistent aesthetic? Drawing from the work of early 20th Century painters like Carlo Carrà and Marcel Duchamp, who attempted to express time and motion in static two-dimensional compositions, Joe Bertino will open a discussion about the strategies available to collage artists to achieve the same.
Portland, Oregon’s Clive Knights will speak about “the restorative role of the fragment.” He writes, “My argument references key commentators on the value of metaphor in recognizing similarity in difference, and as the key motivating force in the creative use of language in its role of sustaining community.” Drawing from philosophy, language theory, anthropology, art history and the early avant-gardes, Knights will present a slideshow of collage art and speak about “the role of the fragment in contemporary culture, rooted, as it is, in the artful practice of collage, while exemplifying a response to the question of how to recover unity in multiplicity, to recognize and share a common ground, a question crucial for ethical social practice.” How does our thinking about fragmentation bridge the gaps between contemporary art and society?
Continuing on themes presented in the symposium, Time & Fragmentation: Collage Theories, in Passing Time in Collage, Brooklyn, New York-artist Joe Bertino will lead a roundtable discussion with collage artists to brainstorm ways in which Change and Time can be expressed through collage. Participants will come together to put their newfound experimental theories into practice by breaking into groups (or working as one large group) to build a collage that captures evolution of a subject within one canvas, in essence imbuing a two-dimensional visual space with temporal linearity. Materials will be provided. Artists should come prepared to discuss, make, and collaborate. The results of this roundtable will be presented at Saturday’s Daily Collage Congress.
ARTIST BIOS
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.
Joe Bertino is a self-taught artist working in both the digital and analog spaces. His collage work draws heavily from the rebellion of the 1990s, the overabundance of the 2000s, the hope of the 2010s, and the cynicism of today. The artist uses collage to analyze the dogmas he was raised under and to make sense of the harmony and humor implicit in conflict. His work has been shown in group exhibitions in New York and Louisiana, and he has created album art for the bands DADRAS and Coma Girls. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. www.yetixhunting.com
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.