11″x14″; collage on paper; 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
You Kissed Me First
at The Pollinator Art Space in Atlanta, Georgia, USA
27 February-10 April 2025
“You Kissed Me First” presents collaborative works by painter Sharon Shapiro and photographer Jody Fausett. The exhibition features fifty spare, poetic collages that delve into themes of desire, gender, and identity, shaped by the artists’ Southern childhoods—Fausett’s in rural Georgia and Shapiro’s in southern West Virginia. These works bridge the realms of eroticism and violence, exposing the underbelly of late 20th-century America’s aspirational culture with its fixation on youth, beauty, and wealth. While Fausett primarily works in photography and Shapiro in painting, their turn to collage becomes a vehicle for exploration—dissecting and reassembling memory and dreams.
14″x11″; collage on paper; 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Their collaboration, which began during a residency at the Virginia Center for the Arts, reflects a shared perspective: that of adolescents on the brink of maturity, captivated by cinema and magazines. The resulting works weaponize the idea of the “cut up”, dissembling bodies and objects and recombining them into an erotics of absence.
(text adapted by material provided by the artist)
The Pollinator Art Space
Studio 109
1200 Foster Street NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30318 USA
Hours:
Tuesday-Thursday: By Appointment
Friday-Saturday: 11:00AM-3:00PM
Sunday: By Appointment