Exhibition

Jim Jarmusch: Newsprint Collages

29 Sep 2021 – 31 Oct 2021

Regular hours

Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

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Widely known for his work in independent cinema, Jim Jarmusch’s creative practice crosses the disciplines of film, visual art, music, production, and poetry.

About

“I remember as a kid, I received a microscope for my birthday. The first thing I examined through its lenses was a tiny scrap of torn newspaper. I was astounded. Instead of a single, solid sheet-like material, it was in fact a tangled mass of threadlike fibers, a chaotic jungle of microscopic pulp. Fascinated, I then checked other types of papers, and some fabrics, which were also interesting and even unexpected—but nothing was quite like the texture of newsprint. Ever since, the fragility and inherently temporary nature of this particular (and now nearly obsolete) material has attracted me. Even when watching an old movie and I see the big “presses rolling,” my newsprint neurons fire up immediately.” —Jim Jarmusch

Widely known for his work in independent cinema, Jim Jarmusch’s creative practice crosses the disciplines of film, visual art, music, production, and poetry. Much like the process behind his scriptwriting, Jarmusch’s collages adopt a method akin to automatic writing in which he attempts to continually react rather than overthink or interpret the results of each action recorded on the page. This exhibition presents a body of forty collages made between 2016 and the present, wherein newspaper images are cut up and combined into one or two layers against a ground of reused cardboard, brown craft paper, or black paper. These works distill many years of collage as a constantly roving creative practice that also grounds the breadth of Jarmusch’s output.

Reconfiguring hundreds of collected newspaper clippings, Jarmusch’s visual interventions are minimal. Within these works, complete transformations can occur through a single gesture (for example, a face becomes a mask or a void). Oftentimes, Jarmusch will include a small section of text from the original page, further obscuring the image while ostensibly offering more of its accompanying context. While some of these works may contain recognizable figures, their fundamental abstraction is often more relevant to the work’s intent—as Jarmusch explains, he is more interested in “variations and repetitions” across all of his work. As part of this process of “reorganizing visual information,” Jarmusch prefers to carefully tear the paper rather than relying on the exactitude of a knife cut—ultimately preserving the microscopic texture that he describes first observing with great fascination as a child.

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Jim Jarmusch

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