Local Color Fine Art Showcase-Collage Explorations by Dave Ferguson
Dave Ferguson was raised with three other adoptee siblings in the south suburbs of Chicago, I discovered an aptitude for drawing and a love for visual art as a kid. This developed and carried on, more or less, into adulthood, and the eventual exposure to the European Dada movement from the early decades of the 20th century, and especially the great German artist Kurt Schwitters, I recognized the great expressive potential of collage. Schwitter's extraordinary small collages and constructions, part of a body of work he called "Merz", whose aim was to "create connections, if possible between everything in the world". Collage, with its emphasis on combining material, texture, and visual information in ways the mind does not normally associate together, is uniquely suited for this ambition. I immediately, and deeply, related to the implication of these ideas, and its potent expressive and spiritual possibilities.
Many artists create in an effort to transcend their individual lives and tap into something larger and with richer collective meaning; collage in its many forms can provide an efficient method out of the familiar and into something new and not seen before. One can elevate the everyday and familiar into another realm: a ticket stub or discarded object in one of Schwitter's transfigurations becomes something else, and is allowed to reveal its latent poetry through its interaction with other elements in the work. As one whose life felt at times fragmented and hidden, such possibilities of an expressive "re-ordering" and renewal felt deeply meaningful.
The act of collage, then, for me, is an attempt, out of the stuff of the everyday, to create an aesthetic "spark", while also allowing the possibility of honoring the forgotten, the plain, the discarded. It is this ironic possibility that I find so thrilling: the ordinary temporal "stuff" of the world can combine in a way that is anything but ordinary, and possibly speaks of other mysterious realms sensed by the human heart and mind. Out of trash we can claim our poetry. These collages, then, are my efforts to open that portal.
