Category: Essays

Essay by Todd Bartel

Mildred I. Washington Art Gallery/Dutchess Community College
Todd Bartel, Curator

The term ‘Uncollage’ uses the prefix ‘un’ to denote when collage is not glued physically, but is glued intellectually. Uncollage – Seamless Unison examines the neologism by showcasing various practices of imagery fusion and providing comparative examples of cut-and-paste collage demonstrating the differences between physical gluing and immaterial gluing across a wide range of media.

I first used the term ‘Uncollage’ in 1999 to describe paintings that depend on image collection and are painted without physical additions glued to the surface—such as the work of Archibaldo, Grandma Moses, Mark Tansey, and Julie Heffernan, all of whom I have also published articles on. All too often, what comes to mind when the word ‘collage’ is uttered is glued paper, but collage is so much more. Collage is an operation that does not require paper or glue, and can be appreciated any time a creative process involves composite incorporation. I presented my thesis at the first annual Kolaj Fest, in New Orleans in the summer of 2018, a multi-day festival & symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society hosted by Kolaj magazine. After that, I expanded the concept in a series of 4 articles, published by Kolaj magazine in 2019 and another four articles since then, as well as written several exhibition essays for shows in the U.S., Portugal and Spain, which has led me to assemble the essays in a forthcoming book, Uncollage & Immaterial Glue — the Collected Essays of Todd Bartel that will be available in early July, 2026.

Uncollage—Seamless Unison assembles the art of thirty-one emerging, well-established, and historically notable artists, including the Abstract Expressionist painter Budd Hopkins (1931 – 2011). Hopkins, who wrote the influential essay, Modernism And The Collage Aesthetic, often made facsimile collage studies for his abstract paintings, and examples of each are the first works visitors encounter inside the gallery. The show includes paintings by Julie Heffernan, Bo Joseph, Fern Apfel, Brian Bishop, D. Dominick Lombardi, Ginnie Gardiner, Talin Megherian, Justin Richel, Denise Shaw, and Amy Talluto, who all fuse collage-based strategies to import and juxtapose collected imagery. Lombardi’s painting is noteworthy for repurposing a previously “completed” painting with complementary stylistic additions.

The exhibition includes several examples of trompe l’oeil drawing and painting, including works by Brian Bishop, Laura Christensen, Ruth Marten, Leo Sousa, and Amy Talluto, and a trompe l’oeil sculpture by Justin Richel. In all of these pieces, the genre is enhanced by the incorporation of ideas, brought into the work, if not known references to other artists’ works. Similarly, Julie Blankenship, Christensen and Marten explore ‘Uncollage’ through altered readymade, employing various drawn and painted enhancements.

Uncollage—Seamless Unison showcases several works that involve image transfer processes, including a Xerographic print on vintage paper by Michael Oatman, a hand-transferred Xerographic photo presented as an “original photograph” by Roma Megherian Bartel, and a painting with multiple acrylic gel-medium transfers by Denise Shaw.

The exhibit highlights an iconic multi-negative gelatin silver print by Jerry Uelsmann (1934 – 2022), whose analog work may be said to have anticipated Photoshop, and, emerging photographer Max Labelle, who photographs cutout photographed images of quotidian objects in real-world settings, which confuse flattened depictions of real objects in actual spaces. The show counterbalances these analog photographic processes with the works of veteran digital collage artists Fran Forman and Maggie Taylor, as well as the work of Leslie Fry, Samplerman (Yvan Guillo), Wendy Seller, and Rowan Buffington, whose hybrid piece provides a blended example of analog and digital applications of collage.

Also included in the show are several sculptures that more or less conceal their composite origins, such as D. Dominick Lombardi’s recycled refuse sculpture and Justin Richel’s stretched-canvas trompe l’oeil brick. There is also a objet trouvé bicycle by Jack Massey, an assisted readymade with an intellectual coupling to a well-known work by Pablo Picasso, as well as the conceptual sculptures of Darryl Lauster and Bo Joseph that expand the neologism into the time-honored practices of lost wax bronze sculpture.

The show also includes examples of static and moving AI image generation by artists Joann, Will Close, and Máximo Tuja, as well as a multimedia installation by James Andrew Scott that blends analog drawing with pixelated digital video, using an array of four 4 x 4-foot LED panels to display looped video imagery incorporating abstracted versions of many of the works in the exhibition.

The unexpected diversity of media and imagery showcased in Uncollage—Seamless Unison reveals the term’s inclusivity, which credits collage in places not often considered collage-based. Máximo Tuja (Argentina/Spain, a.k.a. Max-o-matic), one of the creative forces behind The Weird Show, an independent platform dedicated to exploring and redefining contemporary collage since 2010, and an artist featured in Uncollage – Seamless Unison, described the concept this way: “Uncollage reminds us that the art of collage is not confined to tangible materials but extends into the realm of the immaterial. It highlights the versatility of collage as an artistic practice, allowing artists to explore and combine various elements, whether physical or conceptual, to create entirely new and meaningful compositions.”

The unofficial first exhibition of Uncollage paintings appeared at the Knoxville Museum of Art, where I was invited to peruse the museum’s online catalog of holdings and select half a dozen works from the collection that exemplified the concept for inclusion in the museum’s Currents exhibition as part of 2021 Kolaj Live Knoxville. I gave tours of the exhibition and spoke about the differing strategies of collage and uncollage. There was no invitation, title, or museum didactic for that show, which makes the Mildred I. Washington Art Gallery show the first of its kind. Unlike the unofficial show, the official version showcases a much wider breadth of the concept.

Uncollage – Seamless Unison is one of ten satellite exhibitions presented by the Transforming Collage Hudson Valley Exhibition Series this summer. The exhibitions are organized in conjunction with Making Meaning: A Collage Symposium, taking place July 22–24 at the Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts in Poughkeepsie, NY. From their website, “This important gathering celebrates the evolving language of collage and the role of contemporary artists in shaping cultural dialogue, experimentation, and community connection.” There, I will present a slideshow about Uncollage and the exhibition at the Mildred I. Washington Art Gallery as one of the presenters of the Making Meaning Collage Symposium. Both the exhibition catalog and my forthcoming book, featuring the collection of my Uncollage essays, will be available at the symposium and on Lulu.com. Interested individuals can register to attend the symposium at: https://www.transformingcollage.com

The artist’s reception and gallery talk for Uncollage – Seamless Unison is scheduled for Friday, July 24, 3-6 PM. The exhibition runs from June 29 to July 31st, 2026
Making Meaning, organized and directed by Andrea Burgay & Monica Church, is from July 22 to July 24, 2026.

by D. Dominick Lombardi

Braço Perna 44 in Lisbon and Atelier Ghostbirds in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal, D. Dominick Lombardi, curator

The online Oxford Dictionary defines pretending in this way: “speak and act so as to make it appear that something is the case when in fact it is not.” Most of us can still remember playing as a child; dressing, behaving, claiming to be something we were not but hoped to be one day. Some of those pretend characters were the classic princess, an adventurous astronaut or explorer, a ballet dancer, a sneaky spy, or simply a person that operates a car, boat, train or plane. What is common with artists, is that childhood pretend playing often occurred with aspects of drawing, painting or just simply creating in an imagined world that was funneled through the images and installations produced by the pretenders.

As a child, I clearly remember drawing crazy looking fish on paper, cutting them out and playing with them on the floor as if I was immersed in an underwater world. Luís Almeida remembers making drawings where he would represent what it was like living in an underground world where there were traps, bugs and warring soldiers. He also remembers making drawings of tall buildings with a childhood friend, where the windows would show what was going on inside each floor. When Run Jiang was a child in kindergarten, she remembers drawing a picture of a couple all dressed up and getting married. Soon, other children gathered around asking her to draw one for them, all pretending to be all grown up and getting married. Izumi Ueda Yuu remembers her home in Japan, where there was a window between the living room and the hallway that had many wooden slats. Ueda Yuu used those slats as shelves to display her found treasures: pieces of glass with rounded corners that she picked up on the street, scrap metal, some rusty and some still shiny, dried flowers, seeds, especially large camellia seeds, souvenir wrapping paper, and whirring oil paper as she made installations of those precious things every day in her little private gallery.

As adults, that ability to move into an alternative place that is under control solely by the creator, that form of pretending, is still very much alive in the work of the four artists in the exhibition: Izumi Ueda Yuu, Luís Almeida, Run Jiang and myself.

The art of Izumi Ueda Yuu relates very much to Symbolism in the way it conjures up dreamy narratives through pure, poetic, potent iconography. Everything, every belief, emotion, realization is boiled down to its essence, waiting to re-emerge in the mind and thoughts of the viewer. Once the conversation begins between the art and the viewer, the mysterious spiritual aspect of the art comes forward. The artist’s imagined, created place of make believe is one built of memory, childhood dreams, things that sometimes happen in the periphery that later become central and Ueda Yuu’s art lives in that space where the mind transcends the matter.

Luís Almeida’s art goes back and forth between fantastical, heroic imagined worlds to a brutal form of representation. His ability to reveal a mystical imagining overrun with narratives to the simple truth of the absurd or benign aspects of the everyday, all with an element of wild humor is the core of Almeida’s art. A brilliant draftsman and a provider of unadulterated color theory, this artist is still very much connected to that inner child that once ruled all his thoughts. The message here is: “There is no art without total freedom of thought and expression.” A mental state that hinges solely on his ability to leave it all out there for everyone to see.

Run Jiang’s art is a perfect blend of being and pretending. Jiang’s more colorful works focus on the waking dream state, when one’s thoughts are completely unrelated to one’s physical place. In this instance, Jiang puts forth her own unique way of portraying the multi-planar reality theory whereby previously unseen worlds collide. In her black and white ink drawings which she notes as a Dream series, Jiang brings together lifelong experiences, both real and imagined, into a precious series of vignettes and vistas that can at one moment seem bucolic and the next imperiling.

In my paintings, I am repurposing the thousands of small drawings I made when most of the world was sheltered in place. For an artist, this state of being sheltered and alone is not so unusual. In fact we crave it. However, the danger that lurked just outside the studio door and windows in the time of the worst COVID days was very imposing. Studying, mining and resolving a few of the numerous, relatively automatic drawings I made back then, recreating them into oil on repurposed canvases or on 1960’s and 70’s printed materials gives me the chance to return back to a time when I pretended everything, one day soon, was going to be okay.

The exhibition “Fingindo ou Fingimento (Pretending),” which will include the work of Izumi Ueda Yuu, Luís Almeida, Run Jiang and myself (D. Dominick Lombardi), will be held at two compelling venues. The first will open on October 30, 2025 at Braço Perna 44 in Lisbon. Run by João Fernandes, Braço Perna 44 is one of the more charming spaces in town, where they always present some of the most visually stimulating, intimate and intriguing art in the capital city of Portugal. Luís Almeida and Run Jiang are represented there. The second venue opens on November 7, 2025 at Atelier Ghostbirds, which is run by Mika Aono. Located in Caldas da Rainha, Atelier Ghostbirds is a formidable and central institution in an area where there are many artists living and working. In addition to eye opening and fun exhibitions, the gallery also offers printmaking workshops and art related events.

by Steve Rockwell

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva’s New Spiritual Abstraction carries a vital charge that fulfills Bruce Nauman’s claim in the text of his iconic 1967 neon wall sign, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths. There is an import to Suarez-Kanerva’s paintings that impels the viewer toward the sublime, the evident dynamism of the artist’s execution rendering its draught irresistible. 

The visual gestalt of Elan Flow 6, and particularly Wheel within a Wheel 50, form whirlpools of meticulously painted slivers that deliver A Descent into the Maelström as described by Edgar Allen Poe in his 1841 short story. While Suarez-Kanerva depicts a wheel within a wheel, Poe’s is a story within a story, both revelatory encounters with nature, altogether beautiful and awesome as creations. 

The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel experienced his Wheel within a Wheel as a rupture of the visible heavens, revealing the fiery fabric beneath its skin. He described the appearance and structure of the wheels as sparkling like topaz, all four alike, “Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went.” Not surprisingly, interpreters of our age have imagined alien space craft.

Attempts over the centuries to depict what Ezekiel saw tended to the literal. Modernism, however, has bestowed Suarez-Kanerva the mantle of abstraction, a providential gift to tell her own visual story through her art. The employment of her own brand of the fractal contrasts with the complex mathematical class of geometric shapes. While computers by means of Mandelbrot Sets may generate these forms from virtually anything in our environment from coastlines to mountains, and clouds to hurricanes, each Suarez-Kanerva painting is a unique synthesis of elements directly observed in nature. A fluency in the language of abstraction has made the transcription of her insights in paint authoritative. 

Suarez-Kanerva’s art conforms to a law of geometry that generates a sense of the living from the inorganic. The connection to nature rooted in childhood memories of nature-hikes and world travels had clearly seeded the artist’s vision for creative possibilities. Having grown up in diverse environments such as Oregon and Venezuela further broadened her scope, enabling the inference of broader principles at play in the biosphere. This identification with the “living matrix” has found its medium of expression in the material tools of her craft. The inherent qualities of ink, pencil, pastels, water-colour, gouache and acrylic combined with the properties of paper canvas, and wood, are chemically reactive within the viewer’s sensorium, producing a virtual light show in the rods and cones in the retinal wall of the eye. When channeled through a variety of geometric forms and templates, energy is released. Within the “wheel within a wheel” theme alone, the painterly possibilities presented are virtually infinite. 

In Donald Kuspit’s Whitehot Magazine article, The New Abstraction: Lorien Suarez-Kanerva, he observed that the artist has tapped into the sublime by means of a play of opposites, effectively harnessing the tensions between “biosphere and noosphere,” something that Kant had found terrifying and beyond comprehension. Through an active “spiralling” of the universe as a whole, a kind of unity or Omega Point is inferred, arriving at the transcendence that Emerson in his philosophy advanced. Suarez-Kanerva clearly substantiates Nauman’s contention that the work of true artist plays an essential role in the revelation of “mystic truths.” 

The 2023 water-colour and gouache, Beholder is an integration and refraction of tree, flower and insect as if by laser beam, the 2022 Breath of Life acrylic a dissolution into gentle waft, a dematerialization to airy essence. Each atomized fragment, like DNA, carries its blueprint as seeded potential, sealing the image with the hope for perpetuity. With the Elan Flow series, the germinative release of energy verges on the explosive. Here again is an echo of what Poe described as sublimely beautiful, yet awesome in power as latency.

Suarez-Kanerva is a metamodernist by virtue of the vitalist optimism that infuses her art. The artist’s ability to integrate multiple techniques and theories allow for a plumb of the “the structure of feeling.” Works such as Wildflower Fields, (California Native Plants #2) 2023 and Wheel within a Wheel 112, 2017 retain evidence of the hand, the living gesture as affirmation. Within the diversity of Suarez-Kanerva’s “Visionary Geometries” the point of unifying singularity is the circle, a restless orb in perpetual motion, seeding a harvest from one series of works into another. While the recent Wooded Terrain series of raw wood panel works are devoid of this element, the aura of restless vitality remains.

“I build multiple levels and layers of elaborate designs that emerge from an underlying matrix to create a strong sensation of growth, movement and depth.” The artist’s operating principle of constructing her painting in levels and layers is an understatement. More aptly, Suarez-Kanerva engages in a joyous plunder of the corpus of modernism, its roots and the art of the past. Having surveyed the dazzling complexity of her output, this romp through art history has yielded amply productive treasure. The artist possesses the gift of precisely gleaning the element required from an artist. With Joseph Stella it might have been his dense lattice of abstracted forms. A gloss of the Bauhaus zeitgeist combined with the Abstraction-Creation artists of the 1930s has streamed her influences into an apex in harmony with the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. As Robert Delaynay elegantly summarized, “Painting by nature is a luminous language.”

Lorien Suarez-Kanerva’s New Spiritual Abstraction Exhibitions:

June 14 – August 30, 2024 at the Mary G. Hardin Center for Cultural Arts in Gadsden, AL

June 13 – October 18, 2025 at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA

January 2026 – April 2026 at the Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA