ARTISTS IN THE ARCHIVES: COLLAGE & PLACE AS ARCHIVE

In November 2022, a group of collage artists met in New Orleans to explore the Collage Artist Lab: City as Archive took as its premise that the urban landscape can be viewed as a sort of archive with which artists can draw from, not unlike a material archive maintained by an institution. Literary critic Michael Sheringham spoke about place as archive in a 2016 interview. “Many archives combine all sorts of matter; some of it vitally important and a lot of it just stuff, dross, repetitious bumph. But the other crucial ingredient is the idea of the archive as a process, something that takes place by virtue of the activities of compilation, preservation, juxtaposition, accumulation and so forth, that actually make archival space—at least potentially—active and dynamic. It’s the archive as a dynamic process that combines heterogeneous timescales, scrambles origins and mashes up elements from different horizons. That is what is exciting to us today…So, to think of a city as an archive is to think in terms of dynamic process, restless motion, multiple chronologies and levels of meaning.” Approaching the urban landscape in this way is fertile terrain for collage artists who seek to incorporate a sense of place into their practice. During this Kolaj LIVE Online event, artists from the Lab in New Orleans will be joined by artists who participated in the Collage Artist Residency in Sanquhar, Scotland in Fall 2022. Panelists will present their artwork and discuss what it means to explore a place through the collage artist lens.
Presented in partnership with KOLAJ LIVE ONLINE.