DesignTO: Putting Things Together Exhibition

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.

Cate 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 things 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.

In this series of works, winding walls link the disparate spaces. The idea is that we are connected to the people who are closest to us, no matter what separates us. The ‘rooms’ are made up of pieces of collaged fragments from many different sources. They are dream spaces, the spaces of memory, and so they have a visual poetry about them that is intentional.

This exhibition will be available to the public from September 7th to 25th, 2022.