Most of my art in the last few years has been in collage – “painting” with pieces of fabric or paper and gluing to a hard surface to create a picture.  In addition to collage, I have also been doing assemblage often described as three-dimensional collage.    Assemblage “assembles” objects onto a canvas or board or as free-standing sculpture.   Picasso is attributed with creating one of the first assemblages in his 1912 “painting”, “Still life with Chair Caning”, where he used rope and oil cloth in addition to oil paints.  Collage and assemblage at that time was considered by many to be avant-guard and a “sharp break with previous modes of aesthetic coherence”.  In other words, like the Impressionist style of art before them, these new artistic methods shook the long-standing convention of oil painting, long thought of as the only way to make true art – imitations of “life” done as realistically as possible.  “Collage”, stated MOMA Exhibit Director Margaret Miller in 1948, “has been a means through which an artist incorporates reality in a picture without  imitating it”.  Now, that’s my style – a little avant-guard and representing reality without exact imitation, allowing for a bit of the artist themselves in the art! 

Often assemblage is described as assembling “disparate” “every-day objects” but my assemblages are different.  I do not use “disparate” objects.  My assemblages are  of collections – objects that are intended to go together.  My assemblage art making  grew from my desire to organize my home which grew out of my obsession watching home organization shows on HGTV back when the network first aired in the mid-90s!  To clean out my home and organize, I immediately latched onto the widely promoted organizational mantra to create piles of “stuff” to either keep, donate, decide about later, or throw in the trash.  I began with my studio closet. 

The studio closet was my “junk drawer” closet, a lot of filled shoe boxes crammed in haphazardly because I didn’t know what else to do with it.  (Sound familiar?)  Disorganized closets like these, though,  can be sources of hidden treasure and with this one, I struck gold.   One of the boxes held my forgotten plastic doll house furniture I played with as a child and the “Little People” (what I called the Disney figurines I used as my dollhouse dolls).   I didn’t want to “trash” or “donate” this collection.  I wanted to keep it but was unsure how.  One of the organizing directives from the shows was that if you have collections, you either need to display or get rid of them.  They do no good sitting in a closet or attic, never to be seen.  (One way around this is to stash extras and rotate them in and out of display areas, kind of like what we do with Christmas and Halloween decorations.  It’s also what most museums do; they don’t show everything they own but bring art out now and then to display from their “collections”).

I decided I would definitely “keep” my dollhouse collection and find a way to display them.  Looking through my stash of frames, I came across two that sparked ideas for how I could display my collection.  I would use one for the furniture and one for the Little People.  I had the most fun with the display I made for the furniture.  I loved how the recycled “collage” style frame seemed to naturally create “rooms” of a house –  kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room and den.  I also enjoyed researching and finding  wallpaper to use in each of the rooms and I like how the paper fits the era of the furniture too. 

I look forward to doing more “collection” assemblage.  In 1961, art critic Lawrence Alloway defined assemblage as a result of what he called “junk culture” or “city art”.  Said Alloway of the method, “its source [is] obsolescence, the throwaway material of cities… as it collects in drawers, cupboards, [and] attics…  Objects have a history, first they are brand new; then they are possessions, accessible to a few, subjected often to intimate and repeated use; then as waste, they are scarred by use but available again… Assemblage of such material come at the spectator as bits of life, bits of the environment.”  And Lynne Perrella in, “Art Making: Collections and obsessions”, says that making art with “objects [of our collections] find a new life  and chance to shine…the objects speak and provide a spark”.   After they become “scarred” with use, a framed assemblage is a great way to give our collection obsessions a new life, a chance to shine and speak again.

Do you have a collection you think would present well as a framed assemblage?    Contact me and tell me a little bit about your collection.  I’d love to hear about it and create a one-of-a-kind assemblage for you!