Collage, Layers, and Repetition: Tracing the Flight of the Mind

By: Catie Dillon

03/15/2022

“I show all the traces of the mind’s passage through the world (and) achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering fragments — to me this seems the natural process, the flight of the mind.”

- Virginia Woolf  

When I look to the works in the most recent exhibition presented by Flat Rate Contemporary, I recall Virginia Woolf’s 1908 diary entry. I am drawn to the fourteen artists’ flight of mind, particularly through their use of collage, layered imagery, and repetitive symbols. Through these tools, the artists piece together life’s shivering fragments. Singular elements stack and collide, and in their alchemic way, culminate in a far greater vision. Similar to the warp and weft of a loom, the artists’ experiences, influences, and histories intertwine, becoming realized and tactile in their works of art. 

At first glance, Taylor Loftin’s work, Forest of Sordid Energy, embodies a playful spirit. Primary colors and familiar shapes are pieced together on the surface through the vehicle of collage. Though these collaged elements appear to be floating in space, there is a clear horizon, anchoring the composition. The repetitive crosses signify religion, death, and sacrifice, acting as markers or monuments to an unknown past.

In Death in a Southern Landscape, the cross motif reappears, this time anchored by a relationship to a circular moon. This round shape, though small and unassuming, orients the viewer, further distinguishing up from down. Here, the crosses appear in a heaping pile and perhaps allude to a darker, less playful tone. Loftin’s associative arrangement of universal symbols creates multifaceted and complex landscapes. This keen awareness, placement, and combination of indicators achieve the wholeness that Virginia Woolf so elegantly writes about.

Working in a similar way to Loftin is Vic Barquin, who builds landscapes through digital collage. These layered landscapes reveal an investigation of the digital world in conjunction with the natural world. In Dollar Tree and Under the Brush biomorphic forms and earthy colors are juxtaposed with pixelated planes and digitized drawing gestures. These singular elements, when combined, rendered, and processed through technology, create an invented, yet familiar world. Like a traveler of time and space, and like so many of us, Barquin moves through biological worlds and built worlds to tell a story about the now.

Nathanael Flink engages with a very different process to construct nuanced spaces, utilizing sewn canvas, fabric, acrylic paint, and drawing media. In Pc or Mac, swatches of fabric are puzzled together to create a partitioned picture plane, recalling notions of patchwork quilts and domesticity. A vibrant, dimensional cube hovers in the center, as scribbled gestures surround the central object. These quick marks suggest the appearance of notes, inscriptions, or bursts of great inspiration. 

In PC or Mac, Flink’s employment of the stitched line is critical to the foundation of the work. It is responsible for the illusionistic creation of the cube, as well as the rupture or destruction of the drawn, frenetic marks. I am interested in this stitched line, and its dual power to establish and disrupt formal, compositional relationships. This factual through-line of the work makes Flink’s fragments function as whole.

In Woolf’s above quotation, she writes about fragments of personal history. The “traces of the mind,” or rather individual histories of thought and existence, culminate in art. In Jan Dickey’s works, peeling surfaces reveal a unique material history that can be imbued with personal history. In Toy Box (star spangled), textures flake and bleed like skin. Collaged graphic stars also flake and peel away, like weathered stickers on a city light post. This texture is almost abject, and when juxtaposed with the red, white, and blue stars, it presents another layer of meaning. 

Another work by Jan Dickey, Are you happy to see me or is it just my American Dream?, reveals an ominous black mass emitting smoke. An ether rises towards the sky, like billowing fumes from a subway grate. Made with powdered marble, rabbit skin glue, milk paint, metal leaf, clay bole, egg tempera, oil, and beeswax, the piece looks weathered and forgotten. Once again, the materiality in conjunction with the red, white, and blue stars depicts Dickey’s view of Americana, perhaps alluding to the disintegration and collapse of the “American dream.” This content is revealed through the employment of texture, shape, color, and collage. Here, a whole emerges from fragments.

Taylor Loftin, Vic Barquin, Nathanael Flink, and Jan Dickey build works and worlds in similar ways. I imagine these four makers moving through life and gathering experiences like loose change, collecting moments in their pockets until they manifest together in art. When I decipher the function of collage and repetition in the artists’ layered works, I begin to connect a natural process to their unique flights of mind.