collage
Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is presenting Bruce Conner’s, one-person exhibition of photo etchings, “Dennis Hopper One Man Show, 1971-73” till November 12, 2017.
Acting simultaneously as artwork and as foil for a larger conceptual project, this series is considered by many to be among Conner’s major works. Conner’s collages depict a surreal, hallucinatory universe populated by images of flora and fauna, machine parts and disembodied figures.
Read MoreIn one way or another, much of the late, San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner's best work is about radical change. His 1976 film CROSSROADS, which will be included in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (3 July-2 October), is culled together from footage of US nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands. It is a catalogue of how swiftly such awful weaponry can alter a quiet landscape. Another film, REPORT (1967), includes footage of a serene John F. Kennedy riding through Dallas on 22 November 1963. Along with it comes audio of the journalist Sam Pate's frantic radio announcement, just after Kennedy was assassinated that day, that "something has happened in the motorcade route."
Read MoreCollage played a prominent and happily subversive role in the history of 20th century art; subversive because it undermined distinctions between "high" and "low" art by appropriating mass-produced images. Societal conventions were transgressed—and provocative commentary encouraged—because of the unexpected juxtapositions the collage process enabled. Beginning with Synthetic Cubism (Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque), the use of collage runs straight through Dada and Surrealism (Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, Man Ray, and Max Ernst), Abstract Expressionism (Conrad Marca-Relli, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Motherwell), Conceptual and Pop Art (Ray Johnson and Richard Hamilton), and Neo-Dada (Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns).
Read More"...Conner, however, is an exponent of the new school, like Robert Rauschenberg and others of his madcap group, and – though essentially Dada in his wild inventiveness – has carried collage to a point where it is barely distinguishable from his constructivist work. Anything from a bicycle wheel to a doll’s head floating on a sea of black ink to a mysterious ink-stained mirror or a row of carpet tacks can be found lodged in his creations, and the interesting thing to me is the way the emphasis has shifted from concealment (letting the collage effect creep up on the spectator) to the stressing, and the almost blatantly exploiting, the randomness of the assemblage.”
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