Collages at Sewickley's Sweetwater Center assemble new meanings from odd items

Just as words can be made into poetry, practically any material can be made into art. Especially when combined with other materials or objects.

That's the message behind “Poetic Logic,” an exhibit of collage and assemblage art by 29 artists from across the country, on display at Sweetwater Center for the Arts in Sewickley.

Set up on the second-floor mezzanine, the exhibit was organized and juried by Shawn Watrous, a painter and collage artist from San Francisco who lives in Pittsburgh.

After considering the hundred-plus works submitted for the exhibit, Watrous noticed a shift since the 20th century, when the mediums of collage and assemblage seemed so much more about making the most of the material detritus left over from consumer society.

“Now, that aspect of our world is such a given that we have an entire recycling industry to deal with it,” he says.

Watrous says contemporary collage and assemblage seem tied to the saturation of information we experience via our obsession with screen-based technology.

“The poetic juxtaposition of objects and/or images that exist in any of the works in the show are not all that different than the active scanning of information we all partake in via our phones, tablets, laptops and the like,” Watrous says.

For example, Leah Gose of Grand Rapids, Mich., an assistant professor of photography at Kendall College of Art & Design, creates small collages, about the size of a phone screen, from postcards her great-grandmother collected that she cuts up and mounts to her own Polaroid pictures.

“Though postcards communicate, they don't really communicate a depth of substance to anyone but the writer or recipient,” says Gose, whose piece “Train” is a real standout. “Collaging them with my photographs creates re-contextualized landscapes that depict memories of what remain both physically and metaphorically.”

Michael Willett, an assistant professor of art at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, utilizes not only art materials, but other artists' works to create his collages.

His “Untitled (The Collapse)” was created from a combination of acrylic, screen-print and collaged artworks on canvas.

“All the imagery and elemental forms in the painting are snippets of works by other artists,” he says. “I'm interested in the creative process of sample-based musicians, and I like the idea of creating a visual equivalent of re-contextualizing existing works to create new, dense compositions.”

Gwen Waight, a found-object assemblage artist living in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Peninsula, Ohio, incorporates pieces of broken antique furniture into her works.

She says her art is about “appreciation of things that are discarded, broken or just plain seen in a different light by me.”

Her “Dreaming of Picasso While Sleeping With Leo” was cobbled together from pieces of broken furniture found in the back room of a nearby antiques shop.

As to the unusual title of the abstract work, Waight says, “The place is owned by a great guy named Leo. I thought I would call attention to his contribution to my work even if he wasn't aware of it.”

Not so much a collage, as a drawing with collage elements, “Olas y Alas!” by Cheryl Hochberg of Kutztown, where she is chairwoman of the fine arts department at Kutztown University, is another standout piece, especially for the subject matter depicted.

The drawing pulls together, by way of collage, some images and references that Hochberg hoped would inform each other in a poetic way.

“The image of the dog on the beach and the bird were both gathered in Mexico, and I thought both animals had qualities of beauty and sadness,” she says. “The text is from a song by the Argentine folk singer Leon Gieco. Translated, it means, ‘The sea measures itself by waves, the sky by wings, we by our tears.' This, too, carried both beauty and sadness.”

Though most of the works are wall-hung pieces, there are a few freestanding works.

“Not Cake” by Sarah Simmons will likely grab attention because it takes, according to the artist, “ugly and uncomfortable topics and repackages them in a deceptively nice and sweet way.

“Last year, I was given some Civil War maps, found some cake-box wedding favors and was working through an atlas for a different project,” Simmons says. “The materials combined made me think of the misattributed quote about ‘letting peasants eat cake.' I decided to create ‘Not Cake' to show the causes of war, its victims, those who try to help, those who remain oblivious to the plight of others.”

It's a piece that rotates on an axis, and Simmons says of it, “Of course, ‘Not Cake' spins because we are always doomed to repeat ourselves.”

Perhaps of all of the artists whose works are on display, Simmons proves that not only can art be made from anything, but it also can be made by anyone.

“I live in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, and am employed by Moon Township Public Library,” she says. “Within my position, I am lucky enough to be given free rein to create seasonal and topical displays and decorations from recycled books and paper.”

Kurt Shaw is the Tribune-Review art critic. Reach him at tribliving@tribweb.com.