Use & Mention

Shahin Afrassiabi / Jesse Ash / Diann Bauer / Simon Bedwell / Vanessa Billy / Juan Bolivar / Adam Burton / Tiago Carneiro da Cunha / John Chilver / Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth / Stuart Cumberland / Hans-Christian Dany / Annabel Frearson / Freee / Babak Ghazi / Ghosts Eat Mirrors / Jeremy Glogan / Luke Gottelier / Thomas Gruenfeld / Gerard Hemsworth / Yuichi Higashionna / Emma Holmes / Gareth Jones / Kerstin Kartscher / Pil & Galia Kolleciv / Brighid Lowe / Goshka Macuga / Ellen Makh / Daniel Pettitt / Gunter Reski / Martha Rosler / Michael Schultze / Heidi Sill / DJ Simpson / Jack Strange / Michael Stubbs / John Timberlake / Erika Verzutti / Yonatan Vinitsky / Carla Wright

The appearance of collage in early twentieth-century art marked an immense alteration in visual experience. In collage, space and time (cut, removal) old be sliced and spliced in ways previously unavailable to photography or painting; collage could be additive (placement, juxtaposition, com-position) or subtractive.

Although mainstream visual technologies have today normalized methods that originated in collage, and although the becoming-orthodox of appropriation and post-production have homogenised the terrain it traverses, collage nonetheless still empowers tactics that play at de-skilling while invoking intimacy, interrupted passivity and subtractive force. A reliance on dramatic juxtaposition was characteristic of classic modernist collage, as in Hannah Höch's virtuoso works of the 1920s and 30s. Whatever their variety, contemporary applications of collage increasingly tend to forego the method of explosive juxtaposition, often favoring instead an intricate and implosive thinking. Catherine Malabou's writings propose a concept of plasticity that is intimately linked to exposliveness and emphatically separated from elasticity: an elastic from can return to its earlier set after suffering deformations, whereas a plastic form cannot; instead it retains the signs of alteration when stretcher, gouged, scarred, re-moulded or cut. Collage in this exhibition is understood as a transferable and mutable apparatus of subtractive plasticity.

Use & Mention offers a broad selection of current collage-related activity. Most of the works shown here are on paper but also included are texts and video.

Curated by John Chilver

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