Issue One: Let’s Get This Collage Started

Contents

Kolaj Editor Benoit Depelteau interviews Boston-based Fred Free.

Jp King writes about the disfigurative collage of James Gallagher and Sophie Jodoin.

We learn that Liz Cohn is playing with a full deck in Portland, Oregon.

Billy Mavreas tells us about Felix Morel’s overwhelming visions.

Audrey Smith shows us her studio.

Portfolios from collage artists in Hartford, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; New York City; Madrid, Spain; & Johannesburg, South Africa

And much, much more

Exhibition – Audrey Smith and Maggie Kleinpeter at Blast Gallery

This month, BLAST Gallery in Teaneck, NJ, presents an exhibition of the work of artists Audrey Smith and Maggie Kleinpeter.

Around 2007 Audrey Smith began creating collages in a Moleskine sketchbook as a creative exercise. A year into the project she began to take another serious look at collage and mixed media art, and it blossomed into a new creative focus. Her work has evolved from simple abstract constructions to a more narrative and surrealistic style. She combines vintage and antique medical and science illustration, photographs, and advertising with rich color, patterns, and type. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe and has been published in books and art periodicals.

This series of art is the intersection between Maggie Kleinpeter’s creative life as a painter and her design work for Supermaggie, a screen printed apparel company she operates with Michael Pittard. Incorporating her drawings and photographs along with vintage artwork, these whimsical compositions are created by artfully layering the screen printed images used on Supermaggie apparel. In these artworks the images are transformed from simple prints to layered and textured dreamlike scenarios with the suggestion of a narrative.

Panel Discussion With Winston Smith

Punk Surrealist artist Winston Smith, known for his sulfuric political collages, will be talking about surrealism, art and anarchy with V.Vale, Penelope Rosemont and Ron Sakolsky. This panel discussion is part of the 2012 Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, presented by Bound Together Bookstore in San Fransisco.

Exhibition – Carlos Noronha Feio at IMT Gallery

Plant Life of the Pacific World is a controversial exhibition of delicate flower and plant forms assembled from collaged photographs of nuclear explosions. In this new work Noronha Feio plays with the relationships between beauty, conflict, the foreign and the domestic.

Each work has been classified in accordance with American botanist E. D. Merrill’s book from which the exhibition takes its name. Originally published for military use in 1945, the book’s dry classification of flora is transformed by Noronha Feio into an explosive revelry of intense, amoebic forms. Plant Life of the Pacific World defuses one of the most recognisable symbols of destruction, horror and power to create a sumptuous taxonomy combining the nuclear mutations of popular fiction, the evolutionary mutations of Darwin’s Galapagos and an imagined botany of Bikini Atoll, whose use as nuclear testing grounds followed the book’s publication.

The Future of Kolaj Magazine

In presenting a Pre-Issue, our goal is to offer a taste of what is to come. The first issue of Kolaj will include a number of features not presented in these pages. We invite you to join us on Facebook…

Collage Party in Burlington, Vermont

Friday, March 2, 2012, 5-8PM

This month, to celebrate the art of collage, the Jackie Mangione Studio will host a free collage party for March’s First Friday Art Walk.

Come up to the studio and make a collage with magazines, recycled product packaging and more! Also on view, and for sale, is a special selection of New York City Pop Artist Michael Albert’s cereal collage posters.

The Pre-Issue of Kolaj Magazine will be on hand at the event.