Exploring and Healing Place at Kolaj Fest New Orleans

SYMPOSIUM AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2023

Exploring and Healing Place

with Michal Nachmany, mike durkin, & Monica Church

How do collage artists engage with a place as an explorer and healer? How does the artwork we make activate memory and history? On this panel, three artists share their art practices and speak about how their work engages with place. 

Michal Nachmany grew up in Jerusalem, a collage city, where the mixture of cultures, people, architecture, objects, colors, sounds, and smells from the streets and the markets shaped her awareness of the past as a foundation of the present. Nachmany now lives in New York City where, in addition to maintaining an art practice, she teaches modern and liturgical Hebrew in rabbinical schools and synagogues. A central themes of Nachmany’s work is that “every person and every object has a journey.” Her work focuses on the ways personal and cultural journeys are captured in memories and objects, with work that reimagines and repurposes found objects of daily life. As an immigrant from Israel to New York, she explores the journeys of people and their keepsakes from a personal perspective. She uses collage as a medium to create new stories about the memories and histories evoked by the objects used in her work. In this way she juxtaposes themes of personal and cultural narrative, nostalgia, and repetition using memorabilia, legal contracts, letters, photo albums, matchbooks, postcards, and other found objects from daily life. By bringing together different elements in new ways, she seeks to open up dialogues between the objects, as well as between the people who attend her shows. These artistic dialogues create a space for communities to come together to connect over art, and share memories. On this panel, Nachmany will speak about her practice and present her “Living Monuments” series, a collection of ten artworks commissioned by Columbia University and on permanent display at the Faculty House. The artworks celebrate the inauguration of the university’s new Manhattanville Urban Campus and pay tribute to the history of this Upper Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, as well as to New York City”s Riverside Park landmarks and history.

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, mike durkin writes, “The root of my work is ‘Place’ focused. How we occupy space and the place we are currently guiding the way I construct my practice. The environment, the neighborhood, the residents, how they pass time and work, and what stigmas/connotations are in existence all contribute to the body of my work. Understanding our roots to where we were born, where we live now, and where we hope to live. My work explores the micro and macro versions of place.” durkin’s The Mending Quilt project was born out of the need to repair communities and people. “The Mending Quilt is a collaborative art project exploring the idea of repairing communities through artistic practice and textile-based collage work.” In Philadelphia, the artist guided over sixty participants in a collaboration to make a collage-style quilt. The artist will speak about the impact of the project in a community experiencing houselessness, addiction, and food insecurity. He will also speak about a collaborative collage-style quilt project made at a women’s shelter; using reclaimed fabric as material; and the relationship between art-making, art-therapy, quilting, collage, story-telling, and community building. durkin writes, “A whole person and neighborhood-centered inclusionary experience that welcomes, dissolves stigma, understands barriers, and builds bridges. I seek to understand how neighborhoods work and the individuals that occupy them, what is happening on a day-to-day level, and be sensitive to current stigmas or associations.” 

Monica Church lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, but in 1992 the artist was living in Hanoi, Vietnam on a research visa. She writes, “At that time, Vietnam was sanctioned by the United States government and US citizens could not travel there. While in the country, I made a series of over thirty collages in my sketchbook called, From the Streets of Hanoi. Post-war Vietnam was poor, so finding paper to work with was difficult. There was no litter and the dirt streets were literally swept clean. Eventually, I found Hang Ma Street (Paper Street) in the Old Quarter which sold some of the only paper readily available–Joss Papers. Joss papers–or ghost money–is burned to venerate ancestors. In 1992, I didn’t understand the cultural implications of using these papers in my own works. Naively, they were a solution to a paper source. Joss papers were made of handmade paper and printed by hand–extremely beautiful and thin, perfect for collage. Using them as source material directly connected what I was making to where I was living. This began my practice of making collage based on materials found in situ while traveling. I also used my receipts, toilet paper, plastic bags, lottery tickets, pages from old Soviet books and watercolors. I continue to make collages when I travel that are made from litter & papers collected, and have works representing over fifteen countries and many US cities.” On this panel, Church will present the collage she made in Vietnam and lead a conversation about litter and found material informs artwork. She writes, “Litter picked up from the streets, like cigarette packs, matchbooks, and lottery tickets become collages that reflect specific locales. Do found materials metamorphosize when combined with locally made papers through the process of making a collage? In my practice, I’ve found abstract collages sourced from city streets profoundly reflect a sense of place without using representational imagery.” 

About Kolaj Fest New Orleans

Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 7-11 June 2023. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend. Kolaj Fest New Orleans would not be possible without the support of the members of Kolaj Institute’s Golden Glue and Silver Scissors Societies, Kolaj Magazine and Kasini House. WEBSITE