putting things together Cate McGuire

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present putting things together an exhibition by artist Cate McGuire.

Ordering things, binding them, creating sets, assembling, or bringing things together and organizing them is a way of understanding them.

In our visually literate world, we are adept at reading pictures and making sense of them. Narratives are created when pictures are strung together in forms that we recognize. If there is not an obvious or familiar story, we tend to try to create one.

McGuire explores collage as a means to reshape the meanings of found images by changing the way that they are seen. In this new work, collaged images are built into larger arrangements or patterns. Putting the pieces together, to create a new form, generates connections between the individual images that might not otherwise occur. It creates something entirely unique that is a collection, but is a collection by design.

Because collage pieces are derived from cultural ephemera, such as magazines or catalogues, there is the residue of time in the fragments. Working with found images in this way involves compressing and overlapping time and the remnants of history, in a concrete and a literal way, and this is perhaps one of the most enduring and potentially meaningful qualities of collage itself.