“Collage” by Lisa Collado & Johnsburg School Students
GALLERY HOURS: Wed – Fri, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM | Sat 12:00-4:00 PM | additional hours by appointment
Collage, mixed media
Opening Reception on Friday, April 1 | 5:00-7:00 PM
COVID-19 protocols:
Masks are required while inside the Tannery Pond Community Center, if not fully vaccinated.
ART BY LISA COLLADO
ARTIST STATEMENT
As an artist, I want to portray the various aspects of often complex issues and to ask questions as I present these on my collages. Layering allows this to happen and also reveals stages in my thinking as I work and reflect. A finished work will ask new questions and require a new project.
My work is like a rock formation built up over the years and consisting of innumerable striation – layers of deeply felt and closely examined experience. Artists are the new shamans and serve to awaken and guide others. What artists reveal in their work helps to provide another useful layer for others to incorporate.
I have been developing my special technique over many years. Collage is so suited to the expression of contemporary life, with all its juxtapositions, contradictions, and intersections. It also offers great freedom as well as the opportunity to incorporate elements of other art forms, in my case, text. Each piece is autobiographical and serves as a visual diary.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
LISA COLLADO was born with an overwhelming compulsion to create art, starting with colored pencil and charcoal drawings made as a very young child. Then in 1956 when she was twelve, her father gave her some magazines which she proceeded to tear in strips and paste into a collage of a Spanish dancer. She instinctively knew that was to be her métier and has never turned back, despite often severe life problems that would have derailed a lesser artist. A Gottlieb Foundation Grant awarded in 2002 and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1997 affirmed her dedication to a distinctive point of view.
Collado’s work contains cryptic, poetic commentary on current social and political issues - feminism, the Middle East peace process, homelessness, the millennium celebrations, the attacks on the World Trade Center, commissioned memorial pieces and religious themes are some of her subjects. Words wind in and out and around the canvas, making the process of actually reading the commentary slow and meditative, thus pulling the viewer ever deeper into dense layers of color, form and relevant detail outlined with string.
Her collages are made of things she uses or finds, small objects and scraps of paper that are a part of everyday life. Until 2001 when she moved to upstate New York, Collado lived in New York City where she is still very much a part of the art life of the city. Museum buttons, clips from gallery notices, and snippets of quirky cultural phenomena add a light, sometimes sardonic note to serious themes. Every painting has a key and contains autobiographical details. Each piece is a personal reaction to events and situations and reflects what she was doing at that time. She dates her life by her paintings.
Because of her family background and travels in Central and South America – her father was Spanish and her ex-husband Mexican – Collado has been strongly influenced by Latin American art. Linear images of faces and hands have a primitive abstract quality-Mayan relief carvings come to mind – and she uses strong saturated colors, mostly deep reds and blues.
Collado attended Radcliffe College and New York University. She has a master’s degree in art history, specializing in contemporary women. Among her exhibits are solo shows at Galerie Pro Arte Kasper in Morges, Switzerland; Gallery David, The Emerging Collector and St. Peter’s Church in New York; and Rutgers University. Group shows include the 65th Annual at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., Montclair State College and many others, including a number of collage shows. She is a member of the National Association of Women Artists for which she has curated major shows, the National Collage Society and the Collage and Assemblage Society among other groups and has a long list of public and private collectors.
ART BY JOHNSBURG SCHOOL STUDENTS
Excited by the work of Lisa Collado, Johnsburg art teacher Dr. MaryEllen Mahar assigned students in grades K-12 to create a collage using objects that inspired them. A variety of art making materials were provided and students reflected on ideas they found meaningful. The artwork shown is by a select group of student artists who really found collage to be an expressive outlet.
