The unifying concept of PATCHING is collage. However, only one artist in the show— Kirstine Roepstorff—actually displays collages, in the traditional sense. The other artists have created works that suggest a collage-like fusion of disparate surfaces and textures, within a wholly integral plane. Collage, as a formal technique and medium, perennially remains one of the most relevant artistic strategies from its Dada birth up to today. Yet, the word and idea of collage— combining various images into one overall picture—is too familiar, too commonly accepted, too comfortable to jolt us the way that great collages do with their de-familiarized and puzzling imagery. With the word Patching, I have found an interesting synonym and also a useful analogy.
Like collage, patching is fixing one material onto another, but a patch is used specifically to cover, strengthen, or to mend a hole in something. The idea of patching implies a certain human tenderness, an emotional engagement. I have chosen these works on display precisely for their relation to this notion of a patch as a kind of sensitive mending and careful strengthening. The works reveal humanness, intricacy and fragility, wholeness and fragmentation; they are solitary and complex, and sophisticated yet primitive.
