‘Cut It’ contemplates our voracious consumption of images, to show how artists have redeployed the meaning of images through the enduring techniques of collage, montage and sampling. Using the lenses of news reporting and entertainment media, the artworks are cropped and altered pictures from newspapers, popular movies, the internet and art history, bringing together disparate images to express new ideas.
Collage is often used as a political gesture to question the values advocated by the images’ original sources and contexts. In a contemporary moment, flooded with visual information, the featured artists ask which images, if any, can still be considered sacred. ‘Cut it’ looks to the way that artists reimagine the iconography we consume as part of a larger effort to rethink social structures.
This exhibition was curated to accompany the Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF 2020)
Image: Richard Hamilton, England 1922-2011 / Fashion-plate 1969-70 / Photo-offset lithograph, collage, screenprint and pochoir, retouched with cosmetics on wove paper / 75 x 60.3cm (comp.)
