Todd Bartel

April 2 - May 30, 2027 | Opening Reception / Meet the Artist: Friday, April 2 / 5 - 8pm

ADD 3S ARTSPACE STATEMENT

The Landscape Vernacular collage series is an ongoing body of work I began in the spring of 2011 that explores landscape history, terminology, and imagery while pushing the boundaries of what collage can be—finding, minding, and binding. I cull definitions from a collection of dictionaries dating from the 1800s to the present, and I incorporate text and imagery from various landscape-related publications and etymological sources. I juxtapose definitions with period ephemera and imagery to explore ideas and attitudes about land and land use, addressing the history of landscape depiction, American identity, contemporary ecological imperatives, and subsequent existential questions raised by these juxtapositions. Each work in the series is a singular rumination on select terminology, with a unique collection process and, ultimately, a hybrid fabrication process. The series' aesthetic is visually eclectic, materially limited, and rule-based. The austere look of the series emanates from self-imposed limitations with content, materials, and processes to reduce abstract, complicated subjects to essences and iconographic associations that juxtapose the past with the present to encourage reexamination.

Twenty-two pieces are completed (as of August 17, 2023), five are in the fabrication process, and forty-five additional topics are in the collection and research phases. I use digital and analog materials and methods to construct this series and utilize end-page papers as landscape "grounds." Collecting materials for a project can last days, weeks, months, or years before there is enough visual and textual material to catalyze the construction of an image. I use an "interlocking collage" or "puzzle-piece-fit" collage process I have evolved since 2000 in which all collage elements are cut to fit together precisely, similar to inlaid veneer in marquetry. Cut pieces of paper—an object cut from one page and its surrounding space cut from another page—are joined along their edge perimeters and then burnished on the front and back of each collage to force the differing paper fibers to join into a seamed interlocking unison, and ultimately, the collection of cut fragments are taped in place on the versos. Unlike collages with composite, raised surfaces, the Landscape Vernacular series has seamed, flat surfaces—a unified surface conceptually becomes a "level playing field" and "one for all." In a puzzle-piece-fit collage, all cut elements are secured by various methods on the versos to form single surface rectos—which means there is no unified substrate for these works, and at best, the fractured substrate is sparingly dispersed wherever it is needed. I refer to this collage-based method as "paper-marquetry." I use these interconnected methods to metaphorize past and present human culpability and responsibility in our current time.

While I have an extensive library of paper and books for making my collages and am an avid collector, I also cull digital archives for images and texts that can support the needs of any given work. Whenever possible, I collect ephemera in duplicate. I keep an original for my archives and directly incorporate spares into the collages. I fabricate all materials I cannot collect physically, and the collages frequently include footnotes. Regarding digital technology, I am strict about not morphing, inventing, or embellishing textual or visual information. I am interested in presenting my audience with factual evidence and artifacts that remain relevant in the present moment. However, I resize found materials and isolate specific imagery as needed, and in rare instances, I employ editing strategies to heighten the impact, such as digitally translating a painting reproduction to appear as an engraving. I "republish" (print or transfer) onto period paper to fabricate source materials as close to a facsimile as possible. In this way, republishing provides readymade ephemera for collage-making, and each collage becomes a self-contained thematic museum. Most Landscape Vernacular collages are two-sided and have visual/textual information on the versos. Viewers are encouraged to explore the backs by opening artist-made hinged frames.

For this series, I create technologically hybrid collages using 19th- and 20th-century materials re-made with 21st-century technologies that blur the distinctions between drawing, collage, extra-illustration (Grangerization), and object. The Landscape Vernacular series is an offshoot series of a related body of work—Blank Slates (Tabula Rasa), which explores the history of collage and landscape history as a unified history. Each work in the Landscape Vernacular series has a musical selection, which may be listened to by following a QR code (provided when exhibited). The assigned musical selections provide additional connections addressing the themes of an associated collage. My interlocking and interconnecting methods elaborately combine materials that emotionally, metaphorically, and conceptually address environmental concerns at the root language level to understand historical and contemporary attitudes about collective responsibility in the Anthropocene crises. The Landscape Vernacular series is an emphatic urging for global citizenry and husbandry to redress disconnected histories that, seen in unison, shed light on the quickly changing contemporary environment.