Collages Reflect on Time's Passage

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Much art uses the strategies of collage, cobbling together disparate elements and exploiting juxtapositions and contrasts to explore and challenge boundaries. Perhaps that’s little wonder, as collage seems such an apt metaphor for many of the foundational experiences of adult life, whether falling in love, starting a family, or even just travelling to a new place. For Calgary artist Kristine Zingeler, that latter experience is distilled through images from the Life World Library, a series of American books about life in other countries that was published in the ’60s, a time when overseas travel was more of a luxury than it is today.

After cutting images from the books without any explanatory text, Zingeler layers them together with paint scraped from her palette knife, creating mysterious reflections on place and the passage of time that she then photographs and presents at much larger scale. The paint scraps become miniature abstracts juxtaposed with grainy photographic reproductions, effectively blending two modernist dialogues, one mainstream and matter-of-fact, the other metaphorical and emotive.

With a sense of unity created by shared tonalities, or other formal qualities such as shape or size, the resulting works point to new ways of reading shared histories. Indeed, Zingeler says she found herself wondering about the people portrayed in the books – whether they had ever seen their images, and what they would have made of the way Western photographers presented their lives. While there’s no shared theme between the pieces, she thinks there is common ground. “They’re not all about something specifically,” she says. “But I think what links them is this desire to give a voice to those who don’t have a voice.”

Zingeler’s show, Terra Mobilis, on view at the Edge Gallery in Calgary until March 11, is her first in a commercial gallery since she graduated from the University of Calgary in 2011. Zingeler, who also maintains a painting practice, was a finalist for the 2013 Kingston Prize for Canadian portraiture.

Zingeler says her process is influenced by the books she reads. “The idea of making space for unheard voices is something that the author Anne Michaels does incredibly well and I was referencing her book Fugitive Pieces extensively while making the Terra Mobilis collages,” says Zingeler. “The names of the pieces are taken from her book as a kind of homage to not only her as an artist, but to the romance of collections, the power of the individual, and the incredible loss that accompanies the passage of time.”