CURATORS’ NOTES (Winter/Spring 2024)

Hello, and welcome to our new show at Sharp Hands Gallery! We’re featuring 5 collage artists with backgrounds in 'artchitecture,' and it’s fun to find the Easter eggs - the shapes like rudimentary stick houses, ladders, or windows that play a part within many of their works.

Justin Tuttle and Sameena Sitabkhan seem to share a similar exploratory process in each of their series, bouncing to and from digital and analog. Sameena merges Bollywood, Ben-Day dots, typography, smudges, and punchy colors with a subtle repetition that creates an ocular afterimage as you view each subsequent work. Even the paint itself leaves a tactile fingerprint.

Justin’s 2D/3D work has the nostalgia of a DIY balsa glider, but feels like a step-by-step manual that has come to life and, in doing so, blows apart into the sum of its parts like fuselage stripping away. Never has the combination of primary colors looked so good to us.

Fred Free, always the inventive minimalist, makes words shout off the page like the onomatopoeic sound effects in comics while rotating everyday objects within a frenzy of ballpoint pen and colored pencil. All this on his trademark acid-rich, golden glow paper - we can almost smell it.

Roberta Wahl creates abstract palettes with representational imagery, tactile cuts, tears, and splashes that read as views through a window, overhead shots, interior spaces, and even portraits. Her wild overlays and scrambles reflect not only her life among architectural projects and fine arts, but also her enthusiastic love of cooking. Collages that fortify!

Clive Knights’s pieces serve as an exemplary exploration of abstract art. Hear us out. Pick a piece of his - follow a line as it meanders from one side of the image to the other. Now follow the line you started with but take a different path, and maybe exit at a perpendicular side this time. What shapes could you make with an imaginary pencil following the ragged edges as they come upon straight line and meet back with a torn edge until it falls of the end of the collage? Sit back again and take in the negative space in each piece - sometimes it's created with a torn edge, sometimes with an out-of-horizon-line, sometimes where harsh light hits the objects within the photographs. What organic shapes do they form? Or, sit with a color in each piece, and see what emerges when just looking at that one color - pick yellow, follow it around, feel the rhythm, then pick red in the same piece and let your eye go on a different journey.

We hope you enjoy this collection as we celebrate these architects.

Cheryl Chudyk & Kevin Sampsell, curators

February 2024