Proximity

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Proximity, a group show about collage, re-contextualizing, and coming together. Co-curated by Lindsay Preston Zappas and Wilding Cran.

As we begin to move out of the pandemic, we are caught in a state of pulling our collective pieces back together, re-remembering how to operate as a society rather than as isolated individuals. In many ways, the practice of collage charts a similar terrain—within the logic of collage, one looks around to her immediate surroundings, not reinventing from scratch, but placing objects and images together with intention, creating a new and enlightened context. In this way, collage becomes an expansive term, one that celebrates a fluid and shifting ground as a means to explore new contexts and arrangements.

The artists in this show take up a wide variety of mediums—from textiles and sculpture to photography and work on paper. Some use collage in methodology more than practice; the simple abutting of two unexpected materials or the gesture of placing focused attention on objects that have been intentionally culled into proximity. Others opt for a maximal blending—pulling from their own internal lexicon of mark-making—stitching pattern, figure, and thread together into a singular plane. For many of the artists, flatness becomes a unifying strategy. By collapsing information, objects, frames, or patterns into a singular substrate, a certain merging takes place, re-situating an array of references into an altered field of vision.