putting things together

About

Ordering things, binding them, creating sets, assembling, or bringing things together and organizing them is a way of understanding them.

In our visually literate world, we are adept at reading pictures and making sense of them. Narratives are created when pictures are strung together in forms that we recognize. If there is not an obvious or familiar story, we tend to try to create one.

McGuire explores collage as a means to reshape the meanings of found images by changing the way that they are seen. In this new work, collaged images are built into larger arrangements or patterns.  Putting the pieces together, to create a new form, generates connections between the individual images that might not otherwise occur.  It creates something entirely unique that is a collection, but is a collection by design. 

Because collage pieces are derived from cultural ephemera, such as magazines or catalogues, there is the residue of time in the fragments. Working with found images in this way involves compressing and overlapping time and the remnants of history, in a concrete and a literal way, and this is perhaps one of the most enduring and potentially meaningful qualities of collage itself.

Cate McGuire is a Toronto based artist who uses various media to build spaces that reference both the natural and the built world.  In her extensive work with collage, her goal is to work with time and space to play with cultural ephemera through re-purposing, re-making and recombining existing images.

McGuire has an extensive background in both art and design, having a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Concordia, concentrating in both painting and film studies, as well as a post-graduate degree in Architecture from the University of British Columbia.

This is Cate McGuire’s first solo exhibition as an active member of the Red Head Gallery.