A cat is sitting in the window — a deep purple cat glinting with gold. In his New York studio in the pandemic, Juan Hinojosa has expanded his found-object collages into
three-dimensions.
This one sits serenely looking at a vivid wall panel. Hinojosa has shaped her from found objects from walks around the city, and from Incan oral history. As a Peruvian — his parents came to the U.S. — he has researched early Incan legends of shapeshifters. They could take on the form of a cat, he said, as a shape of power to protect the land.
Heather Polk invokes the strength of women and the natural world in 'Gather your own bouquet,' in the collage show at MCLA's Gallery 51. Photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of MCLA
Around her, the room is a kaleidoscope in paintings and fiber art, prints and panels, as Hinojosa joins Heather Polk, Evita Tezeno, Brandon Brewer, Todd Bartel and Niki Haynes, in MCLA’s Gallery 51’s new spring group show, Layer/Build: Collage Explored, running through April 7.
‘Most artwork is collage in a way, when you think about it.’ — Nicholas Rigger
They explore ideas of collage in contemporary forms, said Nicholas Rigger, assistant director of MCLA Arts and Culture (MAC), as he walks through the galleries on opening night, seeing the works side by side for the first time.
He sees the artists expanding the definition of an artwork made from remixed elements, he said. They are experimenting in new ways, visual and tangible — digital mosaics, overlays and washes of color, moving images, pieces cut out and added in, found objects.
“Most artwork is collage in a way, when you think about it,” he said.
Rigger has curated in collaboration with Gregory Scheckler, MCLA professor in fine and performing arts. (MCLA arts professor Melanie Mowinski has also contributed in the beginning, Rigger said, and she is on sabbatical now.)
They reached out to artists diverse in identities and in ideas and parts of the world. While Hinojosa lives and works in New York City, Brandon Brewer is shaping digital art in Los Angeles, and Evita Tezeno is making her own papers and textiles near Dallas.
Tezeno creates her own patterns and textures, Rigger said. She shapes her handmade cloth and paper into memories from her childhood and intimate scenes with friends and loved ones.
Evita Tezeno honors her heritage and courage and joy of Black folk in her artwork, and Heather Polk invokes the strength of women and the natural world in ‘Gather your own bouquet,’ in the collage show at MCLA’s Gallery 51.
Her works celebrate themes of Black joy and Black identities and the vivid landscapes of her own heritage. She made these new works specifically for this show, and he feels the complement.
Beside her, Heather Polk invokes freedom and lineage, women rooted in the natural world. In Gather Your Own Bouquets, a woman’s hands are holding red-gold coronas of flowers like amaranth. Another touches a plant at root and stem, and cloth patterned in roses takes on strength and grace beside deep-throated blossoms cupping nectar.
Just across the way, Brandon Brewer works in digital collage, Rigger said. He has found his voice in this form, in self-portraits, branching out into painting and analog. His works show strong influences of music — they are all the size of record albums, and Rigger sees stylistic influences too in their play of photographic reality and surreal color.
Juan Hinojosa's Mississippi Queen greets visitors to the new collage art show at MCLA's Gallery 61. Photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of MCLA
In many of them, a figure holds the center of the composition, and something obscures his face. Brewer weaves experiences through them that often hold an inextricable link with his identity as a mixed-race artist in L.A., Rigger said; he sees a sense of confusion that may be both internal and external, the cumulative effect of people mistaking Brewer’s identity, and Brewer’s own shifting sense of his present world, past generations and future possibilities.
In the sequence of record-album squares, he sees patterns like the tiling of Instagram photos. They draw the eye from one to the next, layering images and the artist can build the effect over time — as Lorenzo Baker created a timeline of collage day by day in a real Instagram feed, yearlong collaboration with MCLA in 2022.
Beside Brewer’s work, Hinojosa sets his own mosaics of places and experiences.
He creates many of his works with found objects from salvage yards walks through the city. He laughed, looking at the purple sheen of grape soda can. He can find crushed cans all over New York City, he said, and stretch his budget for art supplies indefinitely when he makes them from scratch.
“I went to school for sculpture,” he said, “but afterward it was hard to maintain.”
He often builds three-dimensional on flat panels, like relief sculptures, glinting with scrap metal, toy birds and snakes, earrings and broken jewelry (often easy to find near bars in the mornings). One has shirt fabric stretched over a panel for backing, another a zipper forming a dark, textural gleam along the edge.
Juan Hinojosa creates collage from objects he finds on walks through New York City, and color-coded masses of vintage discarded objects circle a void in Niki Haynes’ collages, Consumption and Controlled Substance.
Sculptural work in paper like the regal cat at the front of the room is a newer form for him. He began making paper by hand recently, he said, as an artist in residence in the Dieu Donné program in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2021.
Paper sculpture had not come into his periphery until then. Amy Jacobs, senior director of artistic projects and one his mentors and instructors, talked about paper as a sculptural material, and he thought … challenge accepted.
So, while he was there, he tried for the first time to make paper by hand. He dyed the fiber pulp and set it into a mold, letting it dry into shape.
“Making paper was a game-changer,” he said.
He respects paper in new ways, now that he has had the material in his hands from the beginning, shaping the pulp, feeling the physical form take shape, knowing he can influence the composition and the medium in color and texture.
During Covid, he said, his interest grew. For him the pandemic was a productive period for making new work, and at the same time, alone in his studio, he felt the empty space around him — and set out to fill it with color.
He made his own molds, and he realized he could influence the materials that compose the paper itself and set beads glinting in the mix. And then he brought his found-object influence into play.
His cat sits on a pedestal, wearing flowers and a diadem. Cats have taken many divine forms, he said, among many peoples in many times and places, as gatekeepers to nature — every civilization on the planet has revered cats, like the Pharoanic Egyptian goddess Bastet.
In a Cleopatra-like nod, his serene figure has a snake twined about her. Hinojosa admires snakes, he said. People often perceive them as dangerous, but he finds them alluring in their smooth skin and their fluid movment. She wears a crown too, a reference he said to the rock band Mountain’s 1970s classic, Mississippi Queen.
“It’s a song about a lost love,” he said. “And what is art about if it’s not about love?”
Todd Bartel overlays found images and text in Garden study at MCLA. Photo by Kate Abbott, courtesy of MCLA
