Written by Trip Avis

Since its advent, people have hailed photography as a conveyer of reality—unadorned and naked truth, an opportunity to capture things as they are. Art forms like painting rely heavily on the nuances of the artist’s vision; each brushstroke is tinged with emotion. Photography could bypass this internalized perspective. However, as time passes and the medium has moved out of the technical realm and into the echelon of high art, artists have sought ways to turn this sense of reality and reliability inside out. The collage provides the perfect opportunity to change, distort, and elevate the photographic image while imbuing it with new meaning, from the surrealistic to the political. Photographic Center Northwest presents Alterations, a showcase of collages demonstrating an art form unshackled by compositional rules or expectations. The exhibition presents the unique and thought-provoking work of six Pacific Northwest-based artists who challenge the photographic medium and lead it in innovative directions.

Chi Moscou-Jackson blends mediums and forges disparate imagery to create a surrealistic hybrid of photograph and video, natural and mechanical. With his striking college Plant Shop 2062, Moscou-Jackson not only imagines a future where nature and tech-laden consumerism collide, but inspires us to question our relationship with the natural world. The collage depicts three women in gray labcoats perched before a vintage apparatus, laboring over the screens. What was once a occupation deeply tied to nature has been transformed—like the images—into a factory job. The artist takes the collage further by inserting fast-moving video footage of bright green blades of grass and other verdant flora. Emerging from metallic tubing is a selection of flowers, leaves, and ferns — the artificial fruit of the women’s efforts.

Deborah Faye Lawrence, *Conservative Brain*

Despite its often whimsical and aesthetically pleasing nature, the collage is not just a form of art—it is a rooted in ethical discourse: “[it originated] out of the political outrage and detachment experienced by European artists following World War I [...]” This historical context is meaningful to the art form, making it an opportunity to catch the eye and convey a message. Like Moscou-Jackson’s conceptually disruptive work, Deborah Faye Lawrence’s Conservative Brain is equal-parts science, politics, and art. Lawrence’s work is complex in its composition: against a pillow of back-and-white gun advertisements, a cross-section of the human head and brain is constructed from various, sharply-cut images of the American flag. Each depicts the stripes in varying shades of brightness and decay. Some are tinged with a mildewy sepia, others are a crisp, artificial red and enamel white. Parsed together like the text of a ransom note, the collage draws provacative connections between the mentality of “right-wingers” and the size of their amygdala, which governs human fear and rationality. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Lawrence’s collage is the brain itself: composed of elements like swastika banners of the Third Reich and hooded Klan members.

Alterations turns the layman’s concept of the collage on its nose—it is not an aesthetic moodboard or a Pinterest page, it is a powerful tool of shaping discourse or inspiring new ways of thinking and looking at the world.