KOLAJ LIVE ONLINE
PoetryXCollage Journal Launch
Thursday, 11 August 2022 at 6PM EDT (2200 UTC)
REGISTER | PURCHASE THE JOURNALS
In January 2022, we issued a call to artists for a Poetry & Collage Residency and received so many excellent responses that we organized a series of three residencies. The artists heard from guest speakers Kevin Sampsell, Renée Reizman, Rod T. Boyer, and the Poetry Foundation’s Fred Sasaki and were challenged to create page spreads to be included in a forthcoming book of collage and poetry.
In the residency, we challenged artists to move beyond taxonomical debates. Ric Kasini Kadour said, “What is a poem? We do not need to have a singular answer to that question. Individually we must each answer that question for ourselves. In practice, every poem we make will be an example of what a poem is. In considering other people’s work, we should ask ourselves, How is this a poem?” During the residencies, artists interrogated each other’s artwork, collaborated, and shared ideas. And at the end of it, they sent us more page spreads than could fit into a single book. Impressed and moved by the volume and quality of cultural output and a deep belief that this practice–however you want to describe it–at the intersection of collage and poetry deserves a platform, we decided to create a new journal dedicated to it. Christopher Kurts named it PoetryXCollage and said, “How do you pronounce it? You can say the letter ‘X’ or it can stand for the words ‘and,’ ‘in collaboration with,’ or ‘featuring.’ The X is an intersection, a crossroads, or an equation. X marks the spot.”
Join Kolaj Institute and several of the contributing artists— Anthony D Kelly (Castle Bar, Co. Mayo, Ireland), Carla E Reyes (Astoria, NY, USA), Cathy Greenhalgh (London, England, United Kingdom), Cheryl Chudyk (Kirkland, WA, USA), Janice McDonald (Denver, CO, USA), Jennifer Roche (Chicago, IL, USA), Samantha Brown (Blackrock, Co. Louth, Ireland), Thomas Mayer (Berlin, Germany)—in a discussion surrounding the residency, their artwork, and the intersection of collage and poetry. Artists will share images of their work and read their poetry. The event is free & open to everyone. Registration is required.
PARTICIPANTS
Cheryl Chudyk is a Canadian artist currently based out of Seattle. She studies collage and writing under Larry Calkins and Dianne Aprile. She has a background in wedding photography, ballet, jazz, and contemporary dance and dabbles in painting, poetry, and comics. Her collage work has been published in {th ink} Publication, Cults of Life, OLTRE, transitional MOMENTS: restoring equilibrium through the art of collage, and 4 issues of Cut Me Up Magazine. She has exhibited her work in galleries in the US and Europe. She is a co-curator and co-founder of Sharp Hands Gallery, the newsletter editor of The Northwest Collage Society, and is a member of @thecollageclub on Instagram.
Carla E. Reyes is a mixed-media painter and visual artist who has exhibited her artwork in New York City and along the East Coast in commercial galleries, non-profit, and alternative spaces, since 2000. She received her BFA in Restoration and Fine Arts from FIT, NYC, her MA in Art Education from CUNY City College of New York, NYC, and is completing her MFA in Painting at Lehman College, NYC. Carla has also worked as a decorative interior finisher, theater scenic artist, community muralist, and art educator. Her artwork has been featured in a variety of publications and media including The New York Times, The New York Daily News, BBC World News, The Queens Chronicle, and more. Her work has been represented by Raandesk Gallery of Art in NYC, and Leche Vitrines Art Alliance in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Carla currently works out of her studio at Brooklyn Art Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and lives in Astoria, Queens with her husband and two young daughters.
Anthony D Kelly is an illustrator, writer, visual artist and integrative psychotherapist. He is currently based in Castlebar, County Mayo located on Irelands West Coast. He has extensive experience as a gallery administrator, curator and project facilitator from his time at Basement Project Space, an artist led initiative which was part of the cultural fabric of Cork City, Ireland. The aim of this initiative was to generate an exhibition/project space independent of established institutions, to provide development opportunities for emerging artists and to encourage cutting edge experimental practice across a broad range of disciplines. He has studied arts administration, arts participation and global development, and humanistic integrative psychotherapy. Anthony is greatly interested in the Arts as an effective method for engagement with social, political and global development issues; and for seeking beyond the known to formulate the new. He works mainly with illustration, collage, and assemblage techniques to create hopeful, humorous, and sometimes unnerving and deeply satirical imagery. He has exhibited across Ireland, Europe, and in the U.S.A. and has delivered workshops at the Collagistas Festival in both Dublin and Brussels. His work has featured in many publications including Art Reveal, Creativ Paper, Murze Magazine, Kolaj Magazine and the recently released Empty Columns are a Place to Dream book.
Living in eight cities before high school, Janice McDonald‘s affinity for collage may have come from piecing together all those early experiences. McDonald remembers making her first collage in second grade and feeling empowered that she could rearrange reality at will. Art always helped her find her purpose and place as the “new kid.” After graduating from Oregon State with a BFA in art and a concentration in design, McDonald became a graphic designer, eventually establishing a design consultancy in Denver, Colorado. Studying the details in photos she art-directed for clients, McDonald felt some were so intriguing that they should be salvaged, so she started a collection of inspiring elements. Her interest in collage was rekindled by those collected scraps, plus the advent of the computer in design. She writes, “I wanted a way to continue working with my hands.” McDonald has worked in the collage medium for about 25 years now. She’s a signature member of the National Collage Society. She presented a workshop at Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2018 and made a presentation about working in a series in 2019. McDonald was affiliated with Spark Gallery (Denver’s oldest cooperative contemporary gallery), where she was able to curate shows of her work regularly, from 2010-2021. Her collages find homes with individual collectors, and are included in site-specific commissions and in corporate collections, including those of the Adolph Coors Foundation, IMA Financial, CoBank, Beaver Run Resort, Castle Rock Adventist Hospital, Denver Health, Denver Seminary, Aspen Arbor Animal Hospital, and Boulder Community Hospital among others.
Jennifer Roche is a poet, writer, and collage artist who lives in Chicago. She is Pushcart Prize-nominated and the author of two chapbooks: The Synonym Tables (The Poetry Question, 2021) and 20, erasure poems from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Alternating Current Press, 2020). Her poetry work has appeared in SWWIM; Storm Cellar; Tule Review; Footnote: A Literary Journal of History; and Oyez Review. She was named a “Writer to Watch in 2019 & Beyond” by the Guild Literary Complex.
Cathy Greenhalgh is an artist, film-maker (director-cinematographer), lecturer and media anthropologist living in London, UK. She makes ethnographic essay documentaries and short art films for cinema and gallery spaces. Her feature documentary Cottonopolis (filmed in the UK and India), about the cotton industry, is being completed in 2022. Cathy publishes on film-making practices and communities of practice, and cinematographic phenomena and aesthetics. Much of this is based on her long term fieldwork with feature film cinematographers over twenty years. After retiring from working full time in higher education and the film industry, she continues on a freelance basis and returned to art practice, specifically collage, during the pandemic. She currently teaches at the National Film and Television School and the London Film Academy in the UK. Her ongoing visual anthropology project Covid Collage Chronicles was shown at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival in March 2021. Cathy gave academic papers on the project at the RAI / Folklore Conference in October and the Visual Research Conference (American Anthropological Association) in November 2021. She presented the project (online) at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia in February 2022.
Samantha Brown is a London born photographer and visual artist living in Ireland. She studied Fine Art Painting in Camberwell University of Arts, London. Relocating to Ireland opened a new relationship with the landscape using photography and computer aided design to create paintings as a combination of these mediums. Returning to education to study Multi Disciplinary Design at the University of Ulster, 2008. She explored documentary photography, light installations, video and drawing. With continued exploration of varying photographic mediums from analogue, color, cyanotypes, and collage incorporating research into subject matters as the slave routes across the Atlantic, the position of women in the workplace. Analog photographic series explore the self through the landscape. Further examination into how collage is expanding her own practice combining her own photography with history, text, social media and archival source material to explore various narratives and storytellers. The online project Middle Passage hosted by the Centre for Creative Practices delves into the enslaved transportation routes from Europe to Africa to the Americas. Researching documentation into the slave trade spanning works of fact and fiction. Working within the current local government restrictions taking photographs of the local beaches, combining text created a collage moving image work.
Thomas Mayer is a Berlin based multimedia artist and performer from Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. His focus is on creating live art performances which integrate music, video, sound and movement. Mayer graduated in Devised Theatre and Performance at the physical theatre school Arthaus. Berlin in 2019. There he co-created and organized the first Arthaus.Berlin performance festival and received a full scholarship. Prior to this he trained extensively in puppetry, clown and mime with various renowned teachers across Europe. Mayer currently co-runs a collective art space, make-up-11.org, where he organizes regular events and focuses on the development of time-based media, visual art and live performance material. His recent work includes Countless Lives, an interactive performance installation of embodied collage creation. He has created and performed work for PAF Berlin, CTM Festival, Fete de la Musique, Arragua, Emergency Festival Manchester, OPAF, and Festival del Dia de l’Art, Catalunya.
ABOUT KOLAJ LIVE ONLINE
Kolaj LIVE Online is a series of virtual programs in the form of forums, panels, workshops, artist talks, studio visits, and other activities that allow people to come together, learn and talk about collage, and connect in real time to the collage community. Our goal is to bring the community together in a spirit of mutual support and fellowship.Kolaj LIVE Online manifests Kolaj Magazine and Kolaj Institute by bringing together artists, curators, and writers to share ideas that deepen our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement. Learn more at the SERIES WEBSITE.