Paradigm Gallery + Studio is pleased to share Piecing It All Together, a group exhibition of collage works curated by Natasha Guy, opening on June 25, 2021 and remaining on view through July 17, 2021. For our collectors around the world, there will be a virtual opening reception on June 25 at 5:30pm and the exhibition will be open for in-person visits starting Saturday, June 26.

This exhibition is dedicated to piecing together the past to make sense of our present. As we excavate our past, discovering and learning from both a personal and a historical level, we can work towards finding answers or at least some kind of clarity. Collage serves as an artistic manifestation of this excavation. Through piecing together fragments of the world around us and reassembling in a new vision using found or discarded objects, we can re-create a new whole. It is perhaps more about the process than the final result.

Each of the eleven artists offers a unique vantage point from which to view the expansive medium of collage. Though the word is derived from the French verb “to glue,” collage as a framework for art-making goes beyond the cut and paste of the early 20th century. Contemporary collage continues to push the bounds of the medium, as is explored in the work of this exhibition. From diverse materials to unique subject matter, from 3-dimensional to video work, the viewer is invited to consider collage more theoretically as a tool for making sense of change.

*Please email info@paradigm-gallery.com if you would like to receive the collector preview for the exhibition.*

Michele Landel
Michele Landel creates intensely textured and airy collages using burned, quilted, and embroidered photographs and paper to explore the themes of exposure, absence, and memory. She manually manipulates digital photographs to highlight the way images hide and filter the truth. She then sews layers of paper together to create bandages and veils and to transform images into fragile maps.

Michele is an American artist. She holds degrees in Fine Arts and Art History. Her work has been exhibited in France, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, the UK, and the US. Her work also appears in The Collage Ideas Book. She was awarded the 2018 Innovative Technique Award by the Surface Design Association. Michele lives and works in Sèvres, France and out of her art studio in the Paris 9th arrondissement.

Keun Young Park
Keun Young Park depicts the body in a state of transformation. Her works on paper show floating figures, faces, draped arms and cupped hands, which appear to be disintegrating and reforming at once. The artist begins her process with original photographs keyed to various evocative hues. The images are torn and pasted on paper or wood panels. Between the pasted tiny pieces are thin, white, vein-like lines that reveal the texture of the paper’s edge. Park’s practice has a relationship to the precision of Pointillism, the uniformity of Benday dots and the repetition of digital pixelation but her works retain a tactile, hand-made quality through the irregularly shaped elements from which they are formed.

Keun Young Park was born in Seoul, South Korea, where she received her BFA and MFA Degrees in Sculpture at Seoul National University. Since 2005, Park has lived and worked in New York. She has received awards from A.I.R. Gallery, Artist Talk on Art, and the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, as well as residencies with Vermont Studio Residency Program and Triangle Arts Workshop. Park has had numerous solo and group exhibits in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Yannick Lowery
Yannick Lowery is a native of New York City and currently resides in Philadelphia, PA. Claiming both cities as cultural and creative influences, he cites the rich diversity of their visual art histories as fuel for his own practice. Yannick attended The Atlanta College of Art (now SCAD) and Columbia College in Chicago, where he studied sculpture and graphic design, respectively.

As an interdisciplinary artist currently working in paper collage, his practice is informed by cultural and social hybridity, language, and the transitive boundaries between 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional space. Utilizing imagery from print media, he intentionally alters and interrogates the methods these images use to shape the collective consciousness. This work allows him to explore the parallels of time specifically focused on the Black experience in America and abroad.

Jay Riggio
Jay Riggio, a self-taught visual artist, was born in Long Island, New York in 1978. Utilizing original source material from discarded magazines and books, Riggio’s work brings new life to once forgotten imagery through complex, mixed media collages. His works depict dream-inspired stories through unique, surrealistic visual pairings: a reflection of the artist's interpretations on life, love, humor and the human condition.

In addition to exhibiting work in galleries around the world, Riggio has done commercial illustrations for brands like Gather Journal, The New York Times, Brooklyn Magazine, Alice McCall, A24 Films, Lovesick Skateboards and more.

Hollie Chastain
Hollie Chastain is a paperphile artist and illustrator working in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Coming from both a graphic design and studio art background, her work has a story-telling quality, mixing found material, strong graphic elements and modern palettes. Texture plays an important role for her so her illustration process, like her studio work, starts with an analogue foundation. She’s deeply inspired by folklore, music and the unknown and has a passion for folk art and self-taught artists. Her first book, If You Can Cut You Can Collage was released in November 2017 through Quarto Publishing.

Gavin Benjamin
Gavin Benjamin is a multifaceted artist who combines original analog photography and appropriated images with collage, paint, and varnish to create rich and luxurious works that call back to baroque traditions while incorporating elements of current culture to provoke, critique, and explore.

Born in Guyana, South America and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Benjamin received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. During this time, he worked as an interned for the legendary portrait photographer, Arnold Newman. Benjamin also worked as black and white and color printer at LTI and Baboo color labs. From there, he went on to work at Edge Reps and Exposure NY, agencies representing commercial and advertising photographers, prop stylists, and hair and makeup artists. After Exposure NY, he worked as a freelance production coordinator/photo editor with stints at Kenneth Cole productions, Esquire Magazine, Hachette Filipacchi Media, and Good Housekeeping magazine.

Benjamin investigates the intersection of culture, media, politics, fashion, and design, addressing questions that (continue to) confront men of color in America today.

Micaela Latanzio
Micaela Lattanzio was born in Rome in 1981, where she currently lives and works. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, graduating in 2005. Selected group exhibitions: Iron Symbols at the Muspac of L'Aquila, Global Imprint at the Isa Istituto Antincendio di Roma, Donne di Colore presented at Torre dei Lambardi in Magione, Confronti / Poredenja at Kinoteka Jugoslavenska in Belgrade, Visions of Gaia at the Cloister of San Francesco in Monsampolo, When we dream We Are All Creators at Horti Sallustiani in Rome, Every Body Talks at Mattatoio Rome organized by IULM University.

In 2014, she won the special jury award Zingarelli entitled "Silent Tales". The site-specific interventions are a further expressive dimension of Micaela Lattanzio. Selected installation projects: Maam, Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz, Royal Caribbean collection, a public intervention in Poland (Poznan) and a permanent installation at San Domenico in Taranto. The artist has exhibited her latest production at Context Art Miami and Barcu art Fair in Bogota, Colombia.

Clare Celeste Börsch
Clare Celeste Börsch is an artist and environmentalist. She works with thousands of hand-cut images of flora and fauna to create immersive installations that are evocative of our planet’s threatened biodiversity. Clare is dedicated to raising awareness and action around the ecological and biodiversity crisis. Clare has been featured in Oprah Magazine, This is Colossal, The Jealous Curator, and My Modern Met. She lives and works in Berlin with her husband and son.

Michael Mapes
Michael Mapes was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky in 1962 and raised in central Illinois. He earned an undergraduate degree and years later an MFA from the University of Illinois. His background in painting, photography and drawing found their way into his work when gravitating to dimensional collage in 2005. This approach accommodates both his interest and skill in the content creation and composition. The pseudo-scientific metaphor expressed in much of his work reflects an interest inspired by early friends in various branches of science (and a great deal of creative license). Michael lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Dominik Hollaus
Dominik Hollaus is a photographer and graphic designer from Innsbruck, Austria. After graduating from art school he worked for several fashion- and lifestyle-magazines and began to explore new ways to combine different techniques in photography. In his series “Strip Portraits“, which shows contact sheets from 35mm films, the photographed object is separated into 36 single images. After precisely shooting frame by frame, developing the film and scanning it, the contact sheet becomes the final Artwork. This technique allows for new perspectives and proportions. The viewer is tricked into seeing a photoshopped image, when in reality there is no digital manipulation involved.

David Samuel Stern
Artist/photographer David Samuel Stern's work centers on examining photography as a physical interaction in terms of both process and results, along with the medium's often strange relationship to the portrayal of human subjects. Though a photographer by training, David departs from the medium's typical aesthetic concerns by delving into object-making and craft.

The recipient of an MFA from Washington University, St. Louis, in 2006, David's 2015 solo exhibition "Woven Portraits" was featured in BAM's (Brooklyn Academy of Music) avant-garde Next Wave Festival of that year. His work has appeared in exhibitions at Robert Fontaine Gallery in Miami and Marshall Contemporary in Los Angeles, among many others—and has been highlighted in publications such as The California Sunday Magazine.

David has been teaching photography since 2009, holding a visiting post at Pratt Institute in 2013, and independent teaching positions at other institutions, such as Brooklyn Brainery, up to the present. He lives and works in New York.

About Paradigm
Paradigm Gallery + Studio® was established in 2010 by co-founders and curators, Jason Chen and Sara McCorriston. The gallery exhibits meaningful, process-intense contemporary artwork from around the world. Now open 11 years, Paradigm Gallery is globally recognized and known as a tastemaker within their greater Philadelphia arts community. As the gallery grows, it maintains its original mission to keep art accessible. Through monthly donations, free public art installations, and initiatives like Insider Picks, Paradigm Gallery continues to be a champion of small businesses and emerging and mid-career artists.