Sticking Together: New Ideas in Collage

KALA presents: STICKING TOGETHER (new ideas in collage) This collage exhibit presents materials and methods that challenge traditional formal restraints of artistic practice. Currently as a response to the over-commercialization of art, many artists combine various styles and unusual media in an attempt to expand our perception of art and to explore more intriguing visual language. Artists featured in this exhibit use collage and other mixed media materials with a strong content, emotion or concept to provoke the viewer to approach visual art in a new way. Chicago based Megan Stroech uses paint and printed material to create large-scale installation. Stroech completed her MFA from Illinois State University and was recently included in New American Painting and a residency at Anderson Art Ranch. Portland based artists: Kurtiss Lofstrom uses hand-tearing of found material reducing the image to emotive abstract color that are fragments of half-remembered experience; Kelly Saxton (MFA from Pratt Institute) creates time-based landscape collages that expand and contract with growth and decline; Justin L’Amie represented by PDX Gallery in Portland, creates work done in collaboration with friends with a casual off-hand method of construction; Valerie Whittlesey, an abstract painter who works in the garden, combines texture, color and scientific elements to create metaphors that combine to unite and separate people; local filmmaker, Sid DeLuca presents found vintage material from the 1950’s through the 1970s -- fascinated when dialogue from other sources is dubbed into the work crating a surreal effect, Deluca represents this concept on paper. September 14, 2nd Saturday Art Walk, 5-8pm. KALA is located at 1017 Marine Drive in Astoria.