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• Elyse Longair, Queen’s University

Collage relies upon profound understandings of the images and materials being used, with the ability to see beyond the realities and meanings of the “original.” It also invites us to recognize relationships made possible through (re)imagining already existing images in the world. The “cutup” is a powerful medium to enact change and ignite imaginations, as is apparent in the history of modern collage from Cubism and Dadaism to contemporary exploration of collage that contends with the overwhelming abundance of readily accessible visual information. In General Ideas words, “Cut up or Shut up.” A statement that has become increasing valid with the rise of the internet and digital media, pushing the limits of how we think and approach the idea of collage. This panel invites artists, scholars, and curators to collectively value collage and collage aesthetics. With a specific focus on the important qualities of this medium, which are tied to social and cultural critique. As well as a way to (re)think and (re)imagine ideas of the present and the future.

keywords: collage, images, fragments, imagination, future

session type: panel

Drenthe Flora, Randy Lee Cutler. Hand cut collage, 9 x 11 inches, 2023

Syntax First, Randy Lee Cutler. Hand cut collage, 9 x 11 inches, 2020

Dead Forest, Randy Lee Cutler. Hand cut collage, 27 x 10 inches, 2019

A Rip in the Fabric of Time

• Randy Lee Cutler, Emily Carr University

This artist talk explores how collage aesthetics holds compositional meaning while proposing a speculative reordering of source material. As the surrealist enterprise originally proposed, stripping images of their original context, renders them unfamiliar and strange. Then, as now, the unconscious of artist and viewer is given free rein to imagine alternate and emergent worlds. This world making or worlding allows collage to inhabit a temporal vortex, a form of aesthetic archaeology, that takes one back in time to reimagine the future. Perhaps collage is constituted by a ghostly archive of shards from the past, congealed yet nascent with emergent readings. Detached from the continuum of history, how does collaged imagery, filled with the energies of deep pasts and deep futures, blast itself free from the ceaseless flow of images? By purposefully undermining legibility, collage creates rupture in homogenous time as well as default mental and social processes. With its visual confoundments, collage introduces a rip in the fabric of time and its adjacent meanings, where we are invited to think otherwise. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit or the “now-time”, this paper explores those moments where shards, sparks and energies from another time can break through and transformthe present. Benjamin’s political-poetics suggests that the artist can initiate a new order of time with our present actions. In the process we consider how collage rearranges the presumed pictorial stability of its originalmaterial by scrambling time to reveal another, more miraculous world often based on radically different principles of classification, order and temporality.

keywords: collage, speculative, worlding, now-time, pictorial stability

The Surreal Collages of Toshiko Okanoue

• Julian Jason Haladyn, OCAD University

Between 1950 and 1956 the Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue produced a series of collage reflective of a Surrealist aesthetic. With the help of Shūzō Takiguchi, the leading proponent of Surrealism in Japan, Toshiko Okanoue created photo collages that used imagery primarily taken from American magazines left in Japan after the war. Yet her specific approach, while consciously inspired by Max Ernst, demonstrates a powerful visual imaginary through the choice and juxtaposition of images. This paper examines Toshiko Okanoue’s collage practice, which has recently been re-included into the history of Surrealism, considering the specific aesthetic choices she made in several of her key collages.

keywords: Toshiko Okanoue, collage, Japanese modern art, Surrealism

Classroom Collages in 1930s Alberta

• Andrea Korda, University of Alberta

During the 1920s and 1930s, schoolteachers across North America were encouraged to bring cut-outs from magazines into their classrooms as instructional tools. The rationale for this practice emphasized the capacity of pictures to provide students with, in the words of educator Anna Verona Davis, “vivid experiences and accurate mental concepts” that would allow students to view “the pictured experience as reality.” However, handmade learning materials created with magazines, paper, scissors, and glue that survive in museum collections look more like Dadaist collages than like convincing stand-ins for reality. In this paper, I examine visual materials created by Alberta schoolteacher Blanche Hanson in the 1930s that repurposed glossy magazine advertisements for educational purposes. Hanson’s collages celebrate colonial histories and geographies, and show that imperialist narratives travelled freely across popular and educational media. But refocusing on the collage aesthetic of Hanson’s classroom materials and their similarities to Dadaist collage also opens up alternative interpretive possibilities, including a potential for critical and disruptive ways of looking and learning that undermine the dominant narratives circulating in early 20^th-century schoolrooms.

keywords: collage, education, Dada, visual instruction, Alberta

Aydan Hasanova, ondan-bundan: inquiring on culture from this and thats, Experimental Media Space, OCAD U, 2023.

Aydan Hasanova, ondan-bundan: inquiring on culture from this and thats, Experimental Media Space, OCAD U, 2023.

Aydan Hasanova, ondan-bundan: inquiring on culture from this and thats, Experimental Media Space, OCAD U, 2023.

Assembling a Spatial Collage

• Aydan Hasanova, OCAD University

The installation ondan-bundan: inquiring on culture from this and thats plays with a collage approach. There is tension between the intentionality of bringing materials into space, the randomness of assembling and its consequent erratic dispersing effects. With this work I explored the intra-actions within Azerbaijan’s continuously changing cultural identity by fragmenting projections of Soviet Azerbaijani films with found refractive objects. The refractive objects (metal, plexiglass, mylars, fabrics) and film-images were chosen through the process of ‘locating’ culture within an existing environment (usually leftover scraps) and later assembled in space that imitated a cultural ‘sensibility.’ Through the perpetual motion created with industrial fans and the viewer’s movement in the space, the materials would sway and rotate, adding to the dispersion of the film fragments away from their stationary positions onto the wall. This movement of the fragmented images continuously produces new relationships, which I understand as a spatial simulation. This concept of ‘spatial collage’ brings a view of Azerbaijan’s culture into refraction, reconstruction, evocation, fragmentation, and remembrance as effective cultural critique. Drawing upon the reflections from the exhibited installation ondan-bundan: inquiring on culture from this and thats, this paper will further expand on the concept of ‘spatial collage’ as a mode of cultural theorization. I will be thinking through ideas of fragments in motion and walking in collaged space to explore the possibilities of spatial collage.

keywords: cultural theory, cinema, space, collage, visuality