Collage Game: Sarah Coleman’s Art World

Entering Sarah Coleman’s world is leaving behind a lot of what seems normal. It’s a psychedelic funhouse of kid characters and reused treasures. Here you’ll find a chair dressed in vintage magazine paper with archival branding images, a glow-in-the-dark handbag, and iconic prints edited using the Facetune app – elements she has included during the redesign of the Fendi store in Miami ahead of Design Miami last year.

It’s royal recycling – as Sarah creates designer materials, logos and brand archives in ways they never could have imagined before. Imagine a folding chair re-upholstered with Louis Vuitton luggage material and Gucci monogrammed sleeves for hand sanitizers and pill bottles.

No wonder Sarah is beloved by free-spirited luxury fashion houses, like Fendi, who recently collaborated with her on a Spring / Summer 2021 capsule collection. Taking inspiration from the streetwear of the 1990s and 1970s, which Once described as “the greatest fashion era of the 20th century”, the “Vertigo” collection showcases its wavy and hypnotic touch on the classic “FF” logo.

To celebrate the launch of the collection, the brand unveiled the exquisite Fendi Caffé on the iconic Rinascente terrace in Duomo Square in Milan, as a pop-up that satiated guests and their May 11 Instagram feeds. to June 7 of this year. The multisensory experience also included Sarah’s chic take on the ‘FF’ logo that dresses every part of the cafe – from the cabinets to the cappuccinos.

“After completing the Fendi project, I felt an unexpected sense of sadness,” Sarah told Kurator. “I had trouble figuring out [what saddened me] because a project that I had worked so hard on for almost a year was well received and successful. After talking to a few people and sitting down on my own, I realized how overwhelmed I was with the process and just felt sad about the end of this part of the project. Results are a by-product of what I love to do: create, collaborate, and use my hands. “

It is this enthusiasm that informs Sarah’s practice, which is evident in the remarkable collages she has created exclusively for this edition of The Kurator. “The collages expressed all the feelings I had. They were a way for me to rejuvenate myself and the remedy for the sadness that I was experiencing. I felt like I had to get back to work and use my hands to create and express, ”she shares.

The resulting collage works, aptly titled Reloading, are a blend of cultural iconography – an image of a lip sofa with a Daliesque vibe sits alongside a drawing by Edvard Munch’s haunting composition. Le Cri (1893); Sigmar Polke’s Running Scissors (1996) walks past an ancient sculpture of a woman’s head; and a vintage door handle sits atop a 1970s Cadillac.

“I was really happy with the end products, which is usually when I know it’s time to dwell on that particular piece,” Sarah notes of the multi-featured Richard Avedon collages.

images. “I was free to know where to put things and what to use. When I am working well I go to a place where there is not much room for decision making and order because everything is just flowing. It’s almost like there aren’t any verbal explanations of what I’m doing unless it’s analyzed and even then it’s just someone’s perception of what it means and of what’s going on.

And as Sarah continues to gain attention with her work, she reveals two established and emerging designers, whose work she greatly admires in the art of collage.

One of the most fascinating creators of the 20th century, the avant-garde American artist Emmanuel Radnitzky, popularly known as Man Ray, was a great master of mediums like collage, photography, film and photography. paint. Tracing the breadth of mediums in which he worked gives a fuller sense of the artist and the man behind him, as he continued to take risks and become a leading figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements. , while forging its own distinct aesthetic vocabulary.

The focal point of Man Ray’s legendary career is his photographic series which brings together fashion, portraiture and technical experimentation, such as solarization and photograms, which he called “rayographies” – a clever combination of his. own name and the word “photograph”. . The process involved creating images without a camera by arranging the found objects on sheets of photosensitive paper and exposing them to light. Some of his flagship works include solarized and isomorphic portraits of his muse, photographer Lee Miller, and photomontages with multiple exhibitions such as Dora Maar (1936).

His collage experiences also influenced his paintings, such as The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916). He based the composition on a pattern created by chance when he scattered colorful pieces of paper on the floor, which he had originally cut into shapes resembling his memory of a dancer’s acrobatic movements. The resulting piece refers to approaches that are integral to his work, such as the use of negative spaces and shadows, the application of unmodulated colors, and spontaneous composition decisions. Man Ray’s works are exhibited by Gagosian and are part of the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

Ciara ‘CiCi’ Ramirez is the one to watch for her whimsical and whimsical mixed creations in the fields of collage art, fashion design and sculpture. Everything is possible in the hybrid world of CiCi which is

dominated by the creatures of couture – a visual remix that is both fascinating and unsettling. Think of a crossbreed of amphibians carrying a Birkin bag, human-animals lounging in Prada shoes circa 2013, and Barbies with skeleton hands. Filled with color and a fantastic swirl of food images in works such as I’m a Barbie Girl, in a Sprinkle World (2020) and Stardust and Wanderlust (2021), her hand-cut collages are a scattering of visuals that evoke a response.

CiCi deconstructs images and makes recycled textiles to create his art, retracing the history of fashion and its subversive elements. Her custom collage works challenge perceptions of femininity through gestalt, suggesting that we look at a group of objects as a unified whole before seeing the individual parts – a concept she sought to form as an art therapist.