Thanks in part to the talented and inspirational artist/teacher William Dole, Santa Barbara has long been home to a vibrant and sophisticated school of artists who work in collage. In this excellent and informative exhibit, curator Dug Uyesaka, himself a fine practitioner of collage/assemblage, has put together nine of the best Santa Barbara artists to have worked in this medium over the last four decades. William Dole, R. Anthony Askew, Mary Heebner, William Davies King, Susan Owens, Angela Holland, Sue Van Horsen, Susan Tibbles, and Kate Doordan Klavan occupy a wide range of positions within the vast field laid out by the term "collage," but within it they share several qualities that link them in a coherent tradition.
First, there’s the Dole influence, which is “less a style than a way of working,” to quote the man himself. To achieve that way of working requires a lot. One must be blessed with an extreme sensitivity to texture and surface in order to see and feel the image potential of different materials. One has to love and understand the work of photographers, graphic designers, and typographers, and be capable of imagining other people’s whole lives while sifting through scraps of old handwriting and torn remnants of labels, stickers, tickets, and packages. Beyond that, there should be an abiding concern for the environment expressed through a modern aesthetic that’s not wasteful, and work that exemplifies the mantra of reduce, reuse, and recycle.
In the “bibliolage” of King, we find surreal mash-ups such as “Condoleezza Rice: Liberace” (2018), a Condi Rice picture-book biography for young readers that’s now thoroughly infiltrated by paper dolls and bon mots from the famous pianist and fashion icon. In a nod to his academic field, which is theater history, King calls what he does “restaging” books, and the effect is immediately absorbing. Every page in one of these surreal concoctions contains something new and surprising.