When is something a collage, and when is it simply a layered image? And when can you call a "collection" a "collage"?
For me a key part of creating and looking at visual art is paying attention to tangengies, edges, and relationships between shapes. Even looking at one relatively simple painting, my eye jumps from one part of it to another, and I'm wondering why one shape overlaps here, but not there. Is it intentional that the line on one side of the canvas echoes a line on the other? Why is the picture framed like it is? What's 10 centimeters outside the frame on the left? I love these questions, and they're the ones I'm asking myself whenever I'm making something. These questions are a part of every (?) kind of visual art, but for me they're the primary questions of collage. "Why is this piece of an old letter next to this color field, and cropping this specific found photograph?" In collage literally anything can be slapped on top of something else and that creates a relationship. But why? And how much of that relationship is intended and how much emerges unexpectedly?
Every choice doesn't have to be important but I want to have made those choices intentionally.
All that's to say, I'm calling these "collages" even though they're probably not. Their being mounted two-up also helps think of them as collages, because now they're not just responding to what's inside their edges, but to what's happening between them.
The base element in all of these is a handdrawn grid, referencing the often uneven grids and columns in the bookkeeping ledges I use in other collages (and referencing sewing patterns, sheet music, graph data...). Having collected a handful of old ledgers, the ones I like the best are the ones made "on the fly." Maybe a hundred years ago standard bookkeeping ledgers did exist, but it seems like plenty of people just made their own. So I did too, kind of. The grids are obviously not proper ledgers, but are a way of laying claim to the page. In each case I counted the grids and numbered certain containers.
Over the top of each page I monoprinted a solid color using several different stencils. The prints weren't carefully planned, though I did want at least one shape on each page to align somewhat to the grid. Somewhat, but not exactly.
Having done this it was time to find the edges.
Edges are everything.
Edges contain, and edges hint about things not contained. Edges are what make a thing "this thing" instead of "that thing". Craid Mod has written a couple essays about edges here and here. I wrote about edges earlier on the blog here. In my studio I have a half-dozen or so mattes that I use to preview cuts and compositions. I laid these mattes over the prints and looked for compositions that spoke to me.
I tried to find compositions that lived in the middle ground between being balanced and imbalance. There's no way for the right-angled ledger lines not to play off the right-angles of the edges, but how much alignment is interesting and how much is boring? Someone like Agnes Martin lived within these decisions and created amazingly sublime works based primarily on grids. Mounting the images two-up allows another set of grid relationships to develop. In every case the grids don't align to each other, though a couple are close. But then depending on the intensity of the over-printed color, color relationships can overwhelm questions about the grids. Then there's the question of the numbers.
What I hope is that each composition of two images creates a dialogue operating on several fronts simultaneously. When I look at them, I do wonder what lays beyond their edges. What information do the grids and ledges contain? Would zooming in or out change my understanding of their content?
