Catharine Clark Gallery announces a group exhibition titled Remix that includes the work of Thorsten Brinkmann, Nicole Cherubini, Amir H. Fallah, Carmen McLeod, Hilary Pecis, and Mickalene Thomas. The artists hale from Germany, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and for each artist the exhibit marks their first showing at Catharine Clark Gallery. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 27 from 5 to 8 pm and is the second anniversary of Catharine Clark Gallery in its 150 Minna Street location. Presenting an exhibition of international artists working with collage and assemblage stemmed from two conversations with artists about their students’ burgeoning interest in working with these historical techniques. The first exchange was with Josephine Taylor while she was teaching at UC Berkeley. Reflecting on her students’ artistic practice, she mentioned how many of them were preoccupied with collage—an interest that initially came as a surprise to her given that the technique was originally pioneered by early twentieth century artists such as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, and somewhat later by artists such as Martha Rosler, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoch. The second conversation on the subject was with Carmen McLeod who at the time was a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University. She too reflected on the preponderous use of collage and assemblage techniques among her fellow MFAs and her own use of such approaches in her splintered landscape wall works and installations. From her perspective what is important about collage is that “it focuses on the relationship between parts as holding the key to any given system over and above the individual pieces themselves… [and that collage] reveals its own mechanism and highlights its own constructedness.”i Carmen McLeod, Nathan Larramendy, and Catharine Clark decided to further the conversation on this subject and collectively assemble a group of works for an exhibit at Catharine Clark Gallery all of whom are effectively using such methodologies in their artistic practice. While the artists’ works selected for the exhibit are made from materials and techniques associated with modernism, the artists’ interest in and comfort with such practices is conceptually more rooted in the realm of the composite, the computer, cut-and-paste functions, hybrids, music sampling, shuffles, mash-ups and re-mixes than in modernist strategies. Like earlier practitioners of the medium, the artists included in the exhibit may, in part, be referencing modernism as a way to continue to comment upon politics, consumerism and the media via a technique that has historically served that purpose. The Remix artists approach making their images through fragments sourced from across media: photographs, magazine clippings, paper, canvas, found and household objects, glitter, beads, fabric, ceramic, construction materials, and video. These materials are assembled into a fractured whole—artworks that resemble landscapes, portraits, tree houses, abstractions, vessels, and performances. The artists’ career Mickalene Thomas Amir H. Fallah www.cclarkgallery.com Page 2 levels range from regionally emerging to internationally recognized. Their resumes and additional images are accessible at: www.cclarkgallery.com An article in the April issue of Artforum helped to further ferret out their interest in contemporary collage. Titled “Cut and Paste: Charlie White on the Collage Impulse Today”ii, the article addresses how collage is “a common response to the layers of information that burden us…[and its] resurgence in art…an occasion to revisit and update its related popular histories—a shifting story, one that hovers at the fluid seam of art, politics, technology, and mass media.”iii In the article, Charlie White cites such technological breakthroughs as peer-to-peer websites, like Napster in 1999, DJ mixes, free-software projects, internet access (first commercially available in 1988), the release of Photoshop in 1990, Google’s launch in 1998, and the sites that readily facilitate collage practices on-line such as My Space, Facebook, and You Tube, as representing a “convergence of desire and technological capability [that] have created an increasingly voracious appetite for undoing linearity by way or deregulating, dearchiving, recataloguing, rerecording, sharing, stealing, destroying, combining, and redistributing as much information as is accessible.”iv The dissemination of images on the internet has invited alteration, recombination and transformation and artists have arrived at a moment in history in which “the impulse to remix, redit, and reorder media, as well as the analog desire to take tear, and tape imagery, meets the methods to do so with ease and endless availability.”v Interestingly enough, the artists whose work is assembled in Remix, however influenced by digital culture, employ the “analog” or low-tech use of materials, to construct their work. German artist, Thorsten Brinkmann’s performance-like video assigns functionality to readymades that defy logic. He calls himself a serial collector (Serialsammler) and sees this description of himself as a way of also summing up his artistic strategy—a desire to combine disparities.vi Catharine Clark sees his work as a kind of conceptual approach to the idea of contemporary collage—a way of acknowledging, embracing, and assembling a kind of fractured portrait made from the prosaic trash of civilization: “an essential part of Brinkmann’s artistic strategy seems to be the poetry involved in the surprising, sometimes accidental encounter between objects and contexts.”vii. Nicole Cherubini, a Brooklyn-based artists, sculpts clay into deformed and baroque pots not intended to hold anything but which are assembled with intentional holes and porous bases, combining traditional and unconventional materials. Historically Cherubini embedded clay with faux fur, erupting chains and flashy bling; more recently the clay is combined with construction materials like brick and impressions of cardboard corrugation sourced from the very materials in which the unfired clay was packed. Amir H. Fallah, from Los Angeles, makes paintings in which the imagery refers to fantasy-like forts and tree houses. He will also create a sculptural project in the space from a mix of common gallery and domestic readymades. Carmen McLeod, working in Brooklyn, creates wall-mounted installations that refer to landscape from assemblages made of bits of fabric, wood splinters, photographic shards, and drops of paint. Hilary Pecis, a recent graduate of CCA, makes landscapes in which consumer goods are being hemorrhaged from rock formations that are constructed of image shards torn from glossy magazine pages and reassembled and repositioned as surrogate shapes to form images of environments. Mickalene Thomas, also working in Brooklyn, makes elaborate paintings, fancifully adorned photo-collages, and photo-based and Pantone-colored paper collages. Her portraits of African Americans and African American women in particular explore notions of black (female) celebrity and identity while romanticizing ideas of femininity and power. In a human-scaled collage in the exhibition, which is a portrait of Thomas’s hairdresser Fran, the figure sports a kitschy, decorative frock and is pictured as if standing on actual patterned flooring— materials inspired by Thomas’s childhood surrounds. In Thomas’s portrait of Michael Jackson titled Man in the Mirror, she presents a fractured image in black rhinestones of the pop star rendered on multiple white panels.