New Collage features contemporary collage works by Rachael Bartram and Warren Handley. While each body of work complement each other they also stand in contrast to each other. They both incorporate and reinterpret existing imagery, however one set is analogue and the other is digital.
Bartram’s handmade assemblages combine imagery of women collected from nonfiction texts and magazines. Gouache paint is applied to give the subjects facial disguises and masks. Bartram recasts these women as masked heroines, allowing them to be abstracted from the often stereotypical depictions of women in mass media. The vividness of the gouache compounds the juxtaposition by literally contrasting with iconography and objects commonly associated with femininity.
Handley’s work silhouettes images of Brisbane wildlife atop bright, acidic abstractions. Often these critters are derided as they interact with urban and suburban environments. But when they are divorced from their natural habitats and stylised they take on the status of an icon, suspended in a lurid, psychedelic landscape.
