July Show Review — Beginning the Middle: Collage by Marin Fiske

July seems to be a big month for mixed-media exhibits at the Community Arts Center.  In the Grand Hall, we have Marin Fiske with huge photo collages.  In the Gallery upstairs, we have Wayne Thurman with colorful horse collages.  In studio two, or what I like to call “the Elevator Gallery,” we have an installation from Arts For Kids, ETC that has transformed the room into a rainforest.
There are few rules in art, but there is one that is most always relevant:  size matters.  Whether it’s big or small, size is important.  The work of Marin Fiske in our most recent exhibit, Beginning the Middle is big.  Not “terribly huge,”, but big.  With the size of the work comes a presence that welcomes you to inspect closer.  Most of the pieces in her show at the Community Arts Center are around three feet by four feet, which doesn’t seem like a big work of art until you consider the medium: collage.

Marin has found a way to expand her collages beyond the boundaries of the original material, by either photographing the original collage or digitally editing the pieces to enlarge them before printing.  I’m not quite sure which of those methods (if either) that she uses to print the pieces and I’m not sure that it’s really all that important how she creates the work, what’s important is that she does create the work.

I attended Georgetown College with Marin where we both majored in art.  We were encouraged to explore different media and it was not uncommon to see her in painting, scultpure and maybe photography classes at the same time.  I guess it comes as no surprise that this exhibit focuses on mixed-media work. 

Collage has always been one of my favorite forms of art media and while I’ve been at the Community Arts Center, I have seen some great collage.  John Andrew Dixon’s show during May is an outstanding example of what collage is all about, the artist using anything that they can get their hands on that can be glued down.  The greatest thing about collage is that every artist has their own idea about what ingredients to include.  When an artist paints, they select their brush and their color: red, blue, yellow, or any combination of those.  When an artist makes a collage, they have a choice of not only color, but object as well.  Depending on what materials the artist has on hand, they could select a red elephant from an advertisement to juxtapose with a newspaper article about the water shortage topped off with an unpaid parking ticket.  The media itself creates content.

In my opinon, Marin’s content seems to weigh rather heavily on the role of women in society: the options that they are given and the burden of expectations that others place upon them.  The women depicted are for the most part strong individuals. In one piece titled Lebensraum an image stilleto-heeled foot is woven between images of a skyscraper cityscape, a tree, and a map with what appears to be both England and Germany with print that details bombings of radar stations.  In another titled Love Blind, an image of Audrey Hepburn is flanked by two modern pin-up girls. A skeleton of a snake overlaps the women and the print “Love Blind.” 

The work itself is very bright and colorful with bursts of pinks, oranges, flowers, gold foil and if it weren’t in an art gallery, it would be right at home in the realm of contemporary high-fashion advertisment.  The work flows with a welcome kind of energy that moves your eye around the whole composition with ease. With Marin’s method of preparing the work, I think it deals with photography as much as it does with mixed-media collage.  In one piece titled Boil Study, a bubbly transparent shower curtain is wrapped around a few scraps of paper and photographed at close range.  Is it a photograph or collage, or a photograph of a collage?

It’s hard to say.

Marin Fiske’s exhibit will be up during the month of July with an opening reception on Thursday, July 12th from 6-8:00.  Don’t miss your chance to meet this artist.

Thanks,
Brandon Long
Executive Director
Community Arts Center