Piecing it Together

From January 28 to March 17, ArtsWestchester will present Piecing it Together, an exhibition of work by eight Westchester-based collage artists who transform broken images and materials into art that challenges the expected and the everyday. Piecing it together is free and on view in the Arts Exchange at ArtsWestchester, 31 Mamaroneck Avenue, White Plains. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 12-5pm. An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 27, 2012, from 6:00 to 8:30pm. For more information, call (914) 428-4220 x 306.

Collage – the piecing together of fragmentary, often disassociated, images into a new whole – is a personal and obsessive art form with as much emphasis placed on process as on finished product. It was an important medium in the development of modern art, and by the 21st century, the definition of collage has expanded to include an unimagined range of materials and techniques. The artists on view at ArtsWestchester exemplify this broader definition of collage, working with everything from recycled aluminum cans to album covers to shreds of vintage fabric.

Featured Artists:

Natalya Aikens (Pleasantville, NY) A graduate of the Pratt Institute, Aikens has been a fashion designer, an illustrator, and a costume designer. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is deeply influenced by her heritage. Russian fairytales and decorative traditions intermingle with imagery of her birth city in the series “St. Pete’s Stories,” works made from found paper and vintage fabrics.

Michael Albert (White Plains, NY) Michael Albert has been making art since his days studying business at New York University. A prolific artist, his new wave Pop-Art collages deconstruct familiar objects, logos and text and refashions them into colorful paper tapestries. He is also the author of An Artist’s America, published by Henry Holt & Co.

Glenn Fischer (Yonkers, NY) Glenn Fischer, whose work has appeared on magazine covers and in academic texts on the medium, builds his geometric collages out of carefully cut strips from vintage books and album covers. Patterns play with colors. He holds an MA from New York University and is based in Yonkers, NY.

Rima Grad (Larchmont, NY) Ms. Grad is attracted to the randomness and unpredictability of collage. Her small-scale intimate images pull together fragments of her own photographs from recent sojourns abroad and pieces of billboard advertisements. “Humor and sadness seem to coexist,” she says, and her work is a personal exploration in this reality of the human condition.

Bryan Michael Green (Bedford Corner, NY) Bryan Michael Green holds a BFA and MFA from The School of Visual Arts. His photomontages explore ideas of self-representation and self-therapy. Juxtaposing skulls against flowering orchids, Greene layers one digital painting over another to create imaginary scenes that are at once beautiful and unsettling.

Mary Ann Lomonaco (Larchmont, NY) As an artist, Mary Ann Lomonaco turns to her environment for inspiration, sourcing materials from her everyday life. Labels from pantry items or Crayola crayons are transformed into whimsical collages that take familiar items and turn them from the practical into the decorative. 

Luis Perelman (Yonkers, NY) Luis Perelman has been an active member of the Westchester artistic community for close to forty years. He holds a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University and has exhibited works in a number of the country’s best known museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Neuberger Museum. His “Metallic Quilts” are made from found aluminum cans which he then painstakingly cuts, manipulates and treats before piecing them together into elaborate metal collages.