Meghan McKnight Collage Editions - postcards
Egg 1
5 x 7"
archival inkjet print on matte paper
2022
Egg 2
5 x 7"
archival inkjet print on matte paper
2022
"Likely General has been the home of three collections of my collage work.
I draw from my ever-shifting archive of cuttings to compose my collages, a process that feels like painting with paper. Photography serves as a metaphorical fossilization of the paper work; though the original collage is disassembled and its components used in other pieces, an imprint remains, a record of the analogue paper composition. The photos are printed in limited editions of c-prints and archival inkjet prints (giclée).
This new body of work (2022) is a revelling in primordial processes. Egg 1 is about possibility and emergence at an ambiguous scale. Its companion piece, Egg 2, is perhaps the record of a creative frenzy, an unfurling of the potential locked in the egg/planet/seed form of Egg 1. The Purple & Yellow Mimics collages are a celebration of biological diversity and natural selection. A meditation on the wealth of shapes and colour created out of an essential drive to survive, procreate and change. These compositions suggest museology, reading as a display in a cabinet of curiosities or a scene viewed through a microscope, telescope, maybe the contents of a tide pool.
The Monoprints are my first experiment with AI, borne of an accident using a "content aware" setting. The computer interprets the active space of a collage and fills the void of a composition's background with a rhythmic, painterly accident of technology. Accident and chance play an important role in both my painting and collage work. Monoprints is ongoing, open edition experiment.
The process of collecting, dissecting and reassembling found paper into these artworks helps me consider how value is calculated, what is worthy of an extra look or elevation. What do we humans treasure in our brief tenure within the vastness of geological time?
-Meghan McKnight, November 2022"