SYMPOSIUM AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2023
Cut Me Up: Fifth Anniversary
Andrea Burgay with Cheryl Chudyk, Clive Knights, Janice McDonald, Michael Oatman, Rosanne Walsh, and Naomi White
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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.
Cut Me Up is a participatory magazine of visual call and response founded by Andrea Burgay. Each issue presents a call—a curated selection of original collage images that become raw material for reader-artists to respond by cutting, reconfiguring, and transforming them into new artworks. The newly created responses form the content of the next issue. Each issue of Cut Me Up includes 18 reproductions of the selected artworks. It is a compact exhibition, received primarily through the mail, that can be viewed and revisited at any time and place. Guest curators for each issue brings in unique perspectives on what the magazine can do and become. The curatorial calls expand how we think about collage as an art form and how it can address issues of contemporary concern. The calls introduce new processes, techniques and conceptual approaches. Cut Me Up reaches a worldwide community of collage artists. As they consider another artist’s process and psychological motivations when choosing and transforming their pieces, artists make authentic connections to each other’s work. In this way, artists collaborate from afar. They continue to develop these bonds through the Cut Me Up community on social media, where artists interact and comment on each other’s work.
At Kolaj Fest New Orleans, Andrea Burgay will host a panel of artists and curators who have been a part of Cut Me Up over the last five years. Cheryl Chudyk is a Canadian artist with a background in wedding photography, ballet, jazz and contemporary dance, and dabbles in painting, poetry and comics. She co-founded and co-curates Sharp Hands Gallery and is always looking to make collaborative pieces with other artists. Clive Knights is an Englishman living in the western United States and his background is in architectural design, history and theory. He has taught architecture for 39 years and incorporated collage as a mainstay of his pedagogy throughout. Clive has exhibited his collages and monotype prints internationally in many group shows and is currently represented in the USA by Laura Vincent Design and Gallery, Portland, Oregon, with whom he has had two recent solo exhibitions (2021, 2022). He also writes on collage, transcendent space and the human creative impulse. Janice McDonald is an artist whose works find homes with individual collectors, in site-specific commissions, and in corporate collections. Based in Colorado, she exhibits widely and has sustained a daily collage practice for over five years. Janice loves working with torn elements of color and texture, making subtle connections, and attempting to create a dynamic balance between disparate forms and ideas. Michael Oatman lives in Troy, New York, where he teaches in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His large-scale installations and collages have been exhibited internationally and take inspiration from the geopolitical landscape of his Vermont childhood, 19th and 20th century industrial folklore, mainstream cinema and experimental filmmaking. Ongoing themes include eugenics, institutional collections, paradigm shifts in scientific inquiry and the exploration of space. Oatman is the 2003 recipient of the Nancy Graves Foundation Award, and is the first artist invited to work with the archives of Apollo 11 Astronaut Neil Armstrong. Rosanne Walsh is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, who worked in the film industry prior to becoming a public school art educator for many years. Comfortable with several mediums, and with stretching a budget, she prefers to work as a mixed media collage and assemblage artist, feeling a connection to the nuances of objects and materials and the subsequent language conveyed upon combination. Whether painted paper, discarded candy wrappers, old frying pans or hangers, she introduces pieces until an instinctual understanding is felt that guides the rest of the work through experimentation. Naomi White is an abolitionist feminist, artist and educator, working on ideas at the intersection of political ecology and photography. Throughout her work, White addresses an array of complex contemporary issues, questioning dominant ethics and narratives throughout history, and asking how we can shift our focus away from the current racist, capitalist model of domination to one of equity and collective voice, for the sake of all people, animals and the planet.
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