Kevin Brady: New Collages (2018)

What is given is incomparably richer than what we can invent. – Aldous Huxley

Collage developed in response to the rise of modern cities – to the shock, stimulation, and competing lures of urban life. Its appeal, for me, is in the pleasure of searching cities, collecting worthless paper souvenirs, and feeding these into an open-ended art process. Collage is at once an aesthetic object, social document, travel record, and personal expression.

I favor “experienced” paper as a starting point, a given – paper that has outlived its initial use and acquired “individuality.” I work on dozens of collages at once. Some of them come to nothing, but all of them surprise me continually. I play them like so many chess games, and they play me. The process of collage invites the unforeseen and responds to the unplanned. It summons a rounder awareness of elements in play and of possibilities mobilizing. The found paper, for me, imposes a discipline of responding to what is given, and resisting my own willfulness.

More than a language of accumulation – of paper added to paper – collage is a restless exchange of figure and ground. Structures come into being, and turn away from what they had been; identities appear and shift shape; boundaries are affixed and erode. Collage making is constructive and destructive all at once, and the decisions it involves are as direct and intimate as those of drawing.

In the end, these collages are aimed at producing a symbolic, if provisional, unity out of fragments.

 

Kevin Brady
http://lancastergalleries.com
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
May 2018