Feelings Made Visual
When I found John Gall’s collage work in 2019 I was floored.
Why in the world is he making this stuff?
The images themselves made sense to me immediately, but I didn’t understand why.
It seems as though he’s just ripping out pages from books that have been thrown out and is cutting them up and sticking them on paper. Am I missing something? Is it really this simple?
I had been introduced to collage artwork while I was in art school, but for some reason it was different this time. I saw no [visible] intended message, no sense of narrative, and seemingly no specific point of view. The notion that someone would make such strikingly bare artwork, disconnected from any larger idea gripped me in a way that I had not experienced prior. It broke all the “rules of artwork” in such a way that confounded me, to the point that I had to experience more of it.
By day (and commonly by night), I’m a graphic designer. My entire understanding of design, from day one, has been centralized around creating visual artwork to be deployed for a client, that solves problems at a business level. It’s an amazing gig. I’ve had the opportunity to design for a range of different people and organizations, and I’ve loved getting to do work that makes sense to me, isn’t a chore [generally], and has direct and measurable impact for the people that I’m working for.
When I stumbled into John’s work, it didn’t make any logical sense, and yet somehow it seemed to strike all the right chords—
He possessed the freedom to make artwork with, seemingly, no functional purpose. All feeling, all intuition, informed only by, seemingly, momentary decision-making.
In reading John Gall Collages 2008—2018, I learned that much of this work I had been enjoying was borne out of a reaction to the rigid structure of “design thinking”. Wow, what a breath of fresh air to my design problem-solving lungs. I highly recommend that you keep an eye out for a used copy of his book if any of this artwork piques your interest, especially if you are a designer steeped in and feeling exhausted by the structure of design thinking.
Fast forward to two years later, following a commitment to personal work exploring the medium, I have found myself repeatedly having two distinct conversations with people that were commenting on the work:
“I don’t get it. What are these?”
&
“I absolutely love this! Do you have prints of this artwork?”
I’ve never experienced a medium that is so viscerally polarizing and intuitive. It either makes sense, or it doesn’t. It needs an explanation, or it doesn’t. In my experience, I’ve repeatedly come to the same conclusion over time:
Any value or enjoyment of the medium is most often experienced instantaneously or not at all—this seems to be the very essence of the art form.
I don’t think this means that there isn’t lasting enjoyment or value. This is simply to say that, commonly, the artwork itself is made as an act of processing things in real time, through an inherently aesthetic medium—thoughts and feelings made visual at a rate that demands exclusive attention and focus on the part of the artist. I’m becoming more convinced over time that this work begs to be absorbed the same way.
If you’re interested in talking or learning more, feel free to reach out to me—I would love to meet you and talk; I’m still very much learning about this medium. If you’re interested in purchasing artwork, feel free to reach out as well—there are things in the works.
Trying to get better about using way too many exclamation points, so:
Thanks for reading. If you want to keep up with semi-regular artwork, I’m on Instagram: @josiahzcollage
