A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into The Sun

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Art Gallery of Regina, "A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into The Sun," 2021

Artists Phomohobes (Jason Cawood and Colby Richardson), Paul Robles, Gerry Ruecker, and Rhayne Vermette chop up and reassemble images, not peas, for curator Sandee Moore's exhibition reappraising collage – A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into The Sun.

A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into The Sun dispels the notion of collage as crafty kid stuff and instead invites appreciation for the radical creativity and cultural critique inherent in this cut-up technique.

What does it mean to cut up a pea and reassemble it into the sun? Curator Sandee Moore seized upon a theorem in set-geometry to provide a quirky and illustrative analogy to explain collage as a generative process. The Banach-Tarski paradox in geometry is often informally stated as "a pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the sun." While cutting up and reassembling a ball to increase its volume confounds basic geometric intuition, the notion that the blade is not destructive but rather creative is familiar magic to collage artists.

The four artists and collectives in A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled into the Sun hearken back to the radical roots of collage. Collage, and its cousins montage, photomontage and assemblage, appropriate and recontextualize popular messages. For example, early 20th Century avant-garde artists such as Hannah Höch and John Heartfield transformed propaganda into anti-fascist political satire. Later, 1960's pop artists such as Richard Hamilton recombined advertising images to reflect the oppressive ideals of domesticity, gender and capitalist consumption. Today's collage artists continue to skew norms and uncover new ways of thinking about the world produced by illogical juxtaposition.

The art-making duo of Jason Cawood & Colby Richardson, known as Phomohobes, queer the normative desires and lush lifestyles featured in vintage architecture magazines. The duo scan and print their hand-cut collages, returning the source material to the impenetrable membrane of the printed page. Phomohobes have created two unique pieces for this exhibition at the Art Gallery of Regina: a bespoke collage wallpaper and a book of ten thousand artificial intelligence-generated titles for "works not shown."

Winnipeg-based Regina film-maker Rhayne Vermette draws on her training as an architect to create ephemeral fantasy architecture. Vermette encases transparent slivers of film and photo negatives of interior spaces and homes, including her own desk, in bricks of clear Lucite, referencing the fractured nature of memory and experience and the futility of trying to arrest the fleeting and composite pictures created by the mind.

Working intuitively, Regina's Gerry Ruecker gives new life and new meaning to a hodgepodge of cast-off objects, often collecting the sorts of decorative frills and flourishes that are disdained by old-fashioned hierarchies of artistic worth. Ruecker's elaborate assemblages of ornamental picture frames are a radical inversion of the relationship of frame to artwork. The frame is generally not a part of the artwork, but it serves to confer the status of "art" upon the artwork; many of Ruecker's sculptures are nothing but frame!

Finally, Paul Robles understands that each snip of his scissors opens up a space for contradictory meanings to flood through. His complex, lacy cut paper pieces, modeled after the Chines paper cutting technique he encountered when visiting relatives in China, are irresolvable gestalt images - appearing both as tangles of snakes, birds, skulls and flowers and as a grimacing face watching the viewer. Continually shifting between negative and positive space, Robles' work proposes revolutionary equality between subject, material and composition.

The exhibition A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into the Sun invites consideration of the illogical and collage as relevant to a contemporary world that continues to bewilder and confound.

Join the Art Gallery of Regina and the artists to celebrate the magic of collage in the online opening reception on FacebookLive (https://www.facebook.com/228399860562366/posts/3993014167434231/). Visit the AGR's website (www.artgalleryofregina.ca) for updates about the gallery's reopening to in-person visitors and online programming surrounding the exhibition A Pea Can be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into The Sun. Admission to the gallery is always free; please observe COVID-19 protocols.

Connect with the methods, ideas and artists of A Pea Can be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into The Sun: explore the unique image creation and scanner manipulation possibilities offered by the Xerox machine in a 2-hour in-person workshop led by exhibiting artist Colby Richardson on Wednesday, June 2 from 6-8 PM. For more information, visit www.artgalleryofregina.ca