Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm: Recent Collages
October 26 – December 9, 2006
From October 26th through December 9th, Lori Bookstein Fine Art will present new and recent collages by Janet Malcolm. This is the artist’s second solo show at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.
The 20 works on display draw on an arsenal of found and collected material; synthesizing old book covers, disintegrating sheets of statistical data, library cards, tickets and stamps, vintage photographs and all other manner of written and printed material, and regularly punctuated by rectangles of pure, concentrated color. Whether arranged around a loose grid, or bursting forth from their centers, an integral sense of structure emerges out of the debris of decades past.
Malcolm’s career as a writer is a tempting context from which to draw narrative meaning in her collages. As an artist, however, she is a formalist; textual and visual citations may be culled from sources personal, historical or very much mundane, but once appropriated it is their esthetic properties which inform the composition rather than their literal ones. Words and numbers are stripped of their prior meaning, first by displacement (in addition to the disparate utilitarian origins of the source material, words are often in other languages) and then by physical obstruction. Phrases are truncated or bisected, their edges are shaved off, they are veiled behind yellowed vellum or selected, one thinks, because time has already done much to obscure or destroy their message.
Of her collages, the author Lee Siegel has written: “Malcolm’s esthetic choices have a fatality to them: she combines her colors and textures so unerringly that the harmony of her collages seems to be a condition that she discovered rather than an illusion that she brought into being.” Indeed, the paradox of Malcolm’s collages is that they embody an exactness which appears to be both inevitable and freshly, almost casually, arrived upon.
Janet Malcolm: Recent Collages will be on view from October 26th through December 9th. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30am to 6:00pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, the gallery may be contacted as follows: