From Peru, Canson City Comes to New Orleans


AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS

Spotlight on Enrique “Kike” Congrains

Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, July 12-15, 2018. Learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend HERE.

Enrique “Kike” Congrains experiments with themes like death, psychedelics and religion in response to South America and Peruvian religiosity. His ongoing project, “Canson City”, centers around an imaginary town where he is the sheriff. Each collage is part of the mythology of the town that is accompanied by a short story that he writes on the spot as an improvisation exercise. Stories speak about famous citizens, traditions or historic moments of the imaginary place. The stories and collage are published in Spanish on his Facebook page and in English on his Instagram.

Congrains is a self-taught artist who started doing collage after a 10-year stint as an advertising copywriter. His goal as an artist is to make collage popular in Peru and for people to consider collage a respectable medium to express themselves.

For the past two years, Cosgrains has organized CollageWave, an annual festival celebrating all things collage in Lima. He also travels to remote places in the country to improve the quality of life of the people living there by offering collage workshops.

At Kolaj Fest New Orleans, Cosgrains will present on the community of collagists in Peru and how he works in his country and with the rest of the world. He will be part of a discussion on how do other collage artist position themselves as storytellers in their communities? He will also make a presentation of his artwork as part of a symposium session on the role of the collage artist in 21st century society.

To fund his travels from Peru, Cosgrains is holding an online sale of his artwork. A catalog is posted online HERE.

About Enrique “Kike” Congrains

He has shown work in group and solo exhibitions in Peru, as well as Argentina, Spain, Hong Kong, and Norway at the Scandinavian Collage Museum. See more of Congrains’ work on his Instagram page.

Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, July 12-15, 2018. Learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend HERE.

Images (top to bottom):
Skullaby
Plane
Space

by Kike Congrains
Courtesy of the artist