The Brooklyn Rail

Interrupting the regular program requires knowing its shape. For artist Justine Kurland, encouragement from a girlfriend several years ago led her to take a second look at the photobooks in her personal library. After setting aside one hundred and fifty books by white men, the shape was clear. She began the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books (S.C.U.M.B.), a nod to Valerie Solanas’s infamous Society for Cutting up Men (S.C.U.M.), with a manifesto that announced to “officer historian” that (his) time was up. The resulting collages in the series, named after their origin books, chart a new course of time altogether. Each transforms their maker’s original images into present-tense forms, many of which swirl from a newfound center, raging in both the festive and livid senses of the verb. Kurland has said that what began as demolition—taking a wrecking ball to the space these books claimed in her mind, home, and practice—ultimately illuminated collage’s capacity to mend. The medium had the ability to insert contradiction into the slant of any viewfinder. It contended with history. It was also connective tissue: the strategy connected Kurland to a lineage of feminist artists who have long used the mechanics of cut-and-paste to challenge the status quo.

The Rose, a sprawling and timely exhibition on view through the end of the month at CPW, charts that constellation of solidarity, presenting the work of over fifty artists working across seven decades who use collage as radical, restorative fuel. Now in its second installment following a 2023 stint at the lumber room in Portland, Oregon, this exhibition has been curated by Kurland and CPW curator Marina Chao to embrace collage’s circularity: it is organized nonchronologically in the shape of a ring. It is aware of itself and its location in the large, rear gallery of a nonprofit committed to photography, and many of the included works—all by women, queer, and/or BIPOC artists—stretch the possibilities of the lens-based medium and its associations. It is made all the better and more expansive by the collection of Sarah Miller Meigs, a close collaborator and host for the original lumber room show, whose loans to this edition, while not always photo-based or traditional collage works, often illuminate what Kurland has called the “distant cousins” of the practice’s family tree. On every rotation, The Rose, titled after San Francisco Beat artist Jay DeFeo’s renowned artwork of the same name (often called the “idea that has a center to it”), manages to feel intimate and revelatory.

There are projects that employ the additive power of collage to subvert an image’s often singular, rigid sense of place and time. Keisha Scarville looks closely at the promise of citizenship and immigration in her ongoing series Passports, 2012–2025, which greets visitors to the exhibition from CPW’s central hallway. Across the dozens of prints on view (of which there are over three hundred in the full series), Scarville embellishes her father’s teenage passport photograph from Guyana with mixed media and color, rendering his image a diaristic dreamscape of personal mythology and voyage. This entanglement of past and present recurs, notably in the cyanotypes on view by Tarrah Krajnak, Portrait as Protestor (Arm Raised) and Self Portrait (Turned) as Crowd (both 1979, Lima, Peru / 2019, Los Angeles, CA). In a 2019 performance by Indigenous, Peruvian-born Krajnak, who was adopted and raised in the Midwest, the artist photographed herself layered into projections of historical images pulled from political and pornographic magazines from Lima in 1979, using collage to situate her body within documentation of her birthplace and year of birth. Collage, for Krajnak, Scarville, and other artists included here, presents a means to complicate any one notion of citizenship, the body, or identity. It lends narrative and gestural agency to the perceived absolutes of the biometric and the documentary.

While collage is often additive, it can also be subtractive, and several works in the show incorporate absence with tenderness and surprising tactility. In poignant collages by Martha Naranjo Sandoval, the artist removes herself from old photographs of her childhood home in Mexico City, layering additional images of the room beneath where her figure used to be to create the effect of a voided domestic space. The remaining, nearly-there incisions situate the artist’s hand within the work. They crack open time, animating the composition with Sandoval’s memories of a home left behind suddenly for the suburbs when she was seven years old. Across the room, in a sculpture by Jessica Jackson Hutchins, absence becomes a souvenir of the generosity inherent in the creative act. While making the assemblage Sweater Arms (2010), Hutchins wanted to place a rounded ceramic atop a broken wooden chair that had holes in its seat and on its back. The artist removed her sweater, curling its form into the void of the chair’s center so that its knit arms became wispy, supplementary feet for the furniture. In the gallery, the ceramic rests at ease, the disembodied sweater now a pillow to its foundation. A cut in the chair’s back is at once a window and a shadow of absence in the background of the sculpture’s central clay figure. These works and others illuminate collage’s ability to give material form to unseen gestures and journeys that would otherwise be lost to the margins.

In fact, a recurrent theme in The Rose is a resistance to erasure. The exhibition explores collage’s potential to suspend and hold images beneath the light for closer inspection and critique. There is an assurance of accountability in that work, and a practice of recontextualizing images that often go conveniently unquestioned, especially on the internet. In Joiri Minaya’s #dominicanwomengooglesearch (2016), women’s arms, torsos, hairstyles, and shoulder lines are extracted from the search engine’s circling economy of images. Enlarged and mounted to Sintra board with exuberant fabrics on their reverse sides, the heavily pixelated body parts are suspended from the gallery’s ceiling at varying heights, like a mobile. Embedded within the surrounding architecture, the installation eliminates the perceived barrier of the computer screen, presenting the online search results for “Dominican women” as physical fragments that invite questioning, and complexity, to these terms and their meaning. An address to violent realities is one of the throughline achievements of the artists in this show, who compel their audience to look closely at what Barbara Hammer once termed the “invisible subjects.” Whether in Hammer’s study of death in her 2014 “What You Are Not Supposed to Look At” series, Pamela Sneed’s confrontation with police brutality in For Daunte Wright (2022), or Philo Cohen’s grappling with assaults on womxn’s bodies in On Falling (2021–22), dozens of the artists on view in this powerful convening grapple with how to persist within systems that fail.

There are many contradictions in the works and the story of this exhibition, including the tension between weight and lightness. It’s a dichotomy that was surely present for Jay DeFeo in 1966, as the artist watched her iconic, nearly two-thousand-pound painting, The Rose (1958–66), being surgically extracted from the bay window of her apartment, lifted into a van, and carted away at the time of her eviction. She’d shaped paint to its growing surface for nearly eight years. It was a tension that must have been there for Kurland, as she stood amid the dozens of photobooks she’d pulled for S.C.U.M.B. treatment: their physical heft and corresponding absence from her shelves evidence of the role they’d played in Kurland’s artistic formation and the gendered disparity preserved by institutional bias. Both moments marked the death of a self. Both gave way to collage as a language of resilience that made the weighty small and the minutiae vast. It’s a contradiction innate to the practice of collage in its simplest form: a piece of paper surrenders to the blade in an instant. The message pieced together from its component parts can give form to astonishing, enduring truths.