WORLD COLLAGE DAY
The 2019 World Collage Day Poster Artist Is Rosie Schinners
In a recent body of work, Rosie Schinners takes inspiration from brujería, a uniquely Puerto Rican brand of witchcraft that, like its Afro-Latin cousins voodoo, santeria, and umbanda, blends religiosity, ritual acts and objects, and community service with a spiritual lingua franca to impact the health and well-being of its practitioners. More than the wise woman who lives on the edge of town whom you visit to hex an ex-lover, Latina women are reclaiming the bruja mantle as an expression of empowerment and heritage. Schinners renders images of these women in ink and analog collage. They stand in a cloud of colour as flowers shoot like a plume of smoke from their bowls and baskets. This combination of magical realism, heuristic nature, and poetic, outward-looking expression seemed to express something similar to the idea behind World Collage Day: That even far away from each other, we can come together as artists, work our magic, and put something beautiful into the world. For this reason, we have selected Rosie Schinners as the 2019 World Collage Day Poster Artist.
Schinners is a collage artist who resides on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Art from the University of Guelph as well as a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Since childhood, she has been cutting, pasting, and leaving trails of scrap paper around the house. Working primarily with vintage print material, Schinners combines hand-cut collage with vibrant splashes of colour to bring new life to old images. She looks to explore fleeting moments of alchemy, anxiety and the human condition. She writes, “One particular definition of alchemy is ‘a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination’. This alchemy can also be thought of as the invisible energies that surround us, things we cannot see which can make us feel connected or disconnected to the people and places we interact with.” Schinners attempts to make that unseen energy visible, whether as magical blooms of flowers, crowds of connected people, or bursts of raw colour.
Since 2017, Schinners has engaged in a guerilla project that took contemporary collage where it doesn’t usually go. The Dystopian Reader injects art into unusual places. As she reads a work of dystopian fiction, Schinners makes a bookmark for each chapter. She then hides the bookmark in a copy of the text she finds in a library, a used bookstore, or a large bookstore chain. Each bookmark is documented and geo-tagged on Instagram through The Dystopian Reader feed for anyone to locate. Past titles have included The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and 1984 by George Orwell. While The Dystopian Reader is largely based in Vancouver, British Columbia, the bookmarks currently exist in Mexico City and in various places around Costa Rica. She intends to continue the series indefinitely, through various books of dystopian fiction, hiding and sharing collage art worldwide. In 2018, Schinners brought The Dystopian Reader to Kolaj Fest New Orleans.
Kolaj Magazine is working with Schinners to develop a 2019 World Collage Day Poster that will be used around the world to promote the annual international celebration of collage. The Poster will also appear on the cover of a Special Edition of the magazine that is issued in honor of the day.
Kolaj Magazine launched the first World Collage Day on May 12, 2018 with over 50 events in 26 countries.Michael Pajon was the 2018 World Collage Day Poster Artist.
World Collage Day is about artists connecting across borders against a global context of entrenchment and separation. And the day is about an art medium that excels at bringing different things together to create new forms and new ways of thinking. Ric Kasini Kadour, the editor of Kolaj Magazine, writes, “We created World Collage Day because we wanted to honour this community of artists and to remind the world what a spirit of cooperation, mutual support, and creativity can look like.”
Kolaj Magazine invites artists, art centres, museums, galleries, schools, and communities to celebrate the day by hosting events that bring communities together. Ideas include collage making meet-ups, docent-led tours of collage in a museum or gallery, activities for kids, slideshows or talks that appreciate collage’s role in contemporary art & art history, exhibitions of collage, and more. We invite people to come together around collage in their own communities and to connect to the world digitally using the hashtag #WorldCollageDay.
Learn more also at Rosie Schinners Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory page and at www.rosieschinners.ca.