Collage 262

Charlene has a studio in our building at 80 Border Street in East Boston and is a member of Atlantic Works Gallery where we are currently showing this project. She heard about it and asked if she could be a contributor. Here is her artist statement from the Atlantic Works Gallery web site:

"I look for the other side of things (assuming there is another side.) This often involves a road trip. I try to reduce the visible world, which I find increasingly inscrutable, to essentials, using a variety of means, including both painted and electronic media and silkscreen.

Lately, I've been looking a lot at old movies, trying to capture something of their quality of wakeful, tangible dream, the enhanced reality of the black and white, the pivotal moment (the fleeing figure, the man in the mirror, the hand poised on the telephone.)

I take photographs, paint from the photographs, photograph the paintings. I like what the various iterations reveal."

Here are her comments about this collage and project:

"I have been much taken by the literal and other meanings of the title War and Peace; e.g. polar oppositions both intrinsic parts of life, seemingly, both within and without us. I was struck especially by an extended conceit in War and Peace wherein a batallion of insects descends on a large, lush, red, red flower, conveying all the contradictory feelings of
danger and joy and luxury and sensuality and machine-like focus on 'objectives'. For your current show, I wanted to contribute something on the opposite end of the spectrum from what I understood you were doing so far, to introduce some of the yang to the yin or whatever the current metaphor is for the eternal dualities, thus the tiny helicopter/insects buzzing down the page like the black and white of the letters themselves."

Charlene Liska
from page 531-532 of original text