James Michael Starr: Fourteen Days

New Works Space

September 15 – October 13, 2007

James Michael Starr's collages and found-object sculptures have appeared in galleries and exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. His work was selected for four consecutive Critic’s Choice exhibitions at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art and included by invitation in the International Exhibition of Contemporary Collage in Paris, France in 2001. Last year his work was published in the French survey of contemporary collage, “L’art du Collage a L’aube du Vingt et Unieme Siecle (The Art of Collage at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century)”. 

Artist's Statement:

Now used mostly to describe a visual hodgepodge, the word "collage" once referred more to its French origins in the verb "to stick." Collage artists may be the only ones who've noticed the subtle shift. But both the erosion of the term and its popularization provoked me, so I set out two years ago to deconstruct the technique and debunk its two corollaries, hyperactive color and haphazard composition.

In that first round, I melded stark, black-and-white steelcut engravings of anatomical and botanical illustrations to portray humans sprouting plant life. For this exhibition, "Fourteen Days", some of the same visions persist, and the dream-like fragmentations remain, but I have moved on to warmer, slightly less vintage half-tone reproductions of photographs and paintings, all harvested from old books. I think the result is a series more narrative and personal, representing perhaps the next stage in my own deprogramming.