The Collage Collective
February 7 – March 1, 2025
The Collage Collective
Opening reception: Friday, February 7, 5:00-9:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Saturday 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM.
The Arts & Culture Alliance is pleased to present a new exhibition featuring work by some of its member artists who work in collage. Exhibiting artists include Debbie Alley, Jamie Dakin, Barbara Enloe, Natalie McLaurin, Sara Blair McNally, Ellery Nief, Luis Santiago, Ranee Taylor, and Marilyn Avery Turner.
Artist bios/statements:
Debbie Alley is an accomplished fiber artist, renowned for her exquisite botanical prints and hand-painted silks. Her work is deeply inspired by the intricate textures and forms found in nature and the landscape. Debbie’s attention to detail allows her to capture the subtleties and nuances of natural elements, creating pieces that reflect a harmonious blend of natural inspiration and artistic expression. Her creations not only showcase her remarkable attention to detail but also evoke a serene and contemplative atmosphere, perfectly capturing the peaceful essence of the natural world through her exceptional craftsmanship.
Facebook | Instagram | www.debbiealley.com
Jamie Dakin (aka Jams Dakin aka JammersDamners – she / her) is a queer printmaker, painter, & mixed-media maven. Primarily a self-taught outsider artist, she was professionally trained in printmaking by Sheri Fleck Rieth (1946-2023) at University of Mississippi in 2006-07. Jams discovered the gelli-printing process via conversations with another local artist at a First Friday at the Emporium in 2023 and has since gone on binges in her living room, making monoprints like nothing she’s done before. The freedom and flexibility of acrylic + gelli plates have given Jams the time and space to create in ways that limited time in a professional print lab cannot offer. Currently, her favorite process is making a multi-layer gelli print with acrylic and image transfer, reverse painting with more acrylic, and finishing with collaged elements.
In October 2024, she rediscovered woodcutting via Knox Small Press Fest’s Big Prints! Steamroller Weekend and plans to participate again. In connection, Jams has made friends with a local cohort of printmakers (Printmakers Anonymous at Relay Ridge) that she loves and plans to begin teaching workshops at Knoxville Arts Center (KAC) in March / April 2025. From the Mississippi Delta, North Mississippi Hill Country, Brooklyn/New York City, and Atlanta, Jams has made The Maker City her home since 2018 with her fellow-artist partner, Luis Santiago.
Barbara Enloe is a retired Knox County teacher and has done some kind of art for as long as she can remember. She enjoys exploring new mediums and has recently discovered alcohol inks. She loves the vibrant colors they bring to her art.
Lines are the most basic visual element in art. Theoretically a line is an extended dot. Euclid said a line is a multitude of points. The point is ‘something’ that has no dimension. The five primary types of lines in art are horizontal, vertical, diagonal, curved and zigzag. Each type represents different emotions – horizontal-calmness, vertical-power and sophistication, diagonal-movement and fluidity, curved-generates sensuality, softness and zigzag-sense of dynamism, chaos.
We also use the word line in many phrases – ‘fall in line’, ‘line of duty’, ‘top of the line’, etc. Each different use evoking a different emotion or meaning. In my work I have used both the elements of art and phrases to bring in the use of lines. The show would start with zigzag – a sense of chaos and end with horizontal-a sense of calmness. In between would be vertical lines – trying to reach the path of power and forthcoming, diagonal – representing instability alone the path to calmness and finally curved – more relaxing and soft.
Natalie McLaurin spent the first eighteen years of her life in Knoxville, the oldest of three. Her grandmother taught her to knit at the age of four, a feat that tells more about her grandmother than Natalie. She frequently won kite-flying contests as a young child and was lucky enough to go to New Prospect Art Center art camp in the basement of the Candy Factory, where she learned how to use a loom, pottery wheel, and many other crafts. She was taught by local artists who used craft as their medium throughout her childhood. This connection to craft, handed-down skills, and making do with materials you already have has remained important to her work.
In this work I am using traditional quilting patterns with the images of my personal Tupperware. What am I handing down to future generations, what am I leaving behind compared to those who came before me?
Sara Blair McNally is a working artist and art instructor residing in Knoxville with her husband and children. She has been creating work since 2001, combining photography, film, mixed media, and performance. Being an avid gardener and nature lover, you often can find elements of the natural world in McNally’s work. The recent death of her father and stepfather has expanded an exploration of life and death as well as time in her current creations. Her art has been published and exhibited internationally while receiving multiple Juror and Viewer’s awards.
Ellery Nief is a mixed-media artist whose work focuses on the use of color, texture, and form to create process-driven collages. Her artistic practice is rooted in experimentation, layering monoprint papers, found images, and diverse materials to craft dynamic and tactile compositions. With a deep appreciation for the transformative nature of the creative process, Ellery embraces the unpredictability of mixed media, allowing each piece to evolve organically. Through vibrant and textural works, she invites viewers to explore the interplay of materials, and the beauty found in the act of making. Ellery lives and teaches in the Knoxville area.
Luis Santiago is a traditional, multimedia artist who specializes in collage. He has used a variety of materials for his works, from dirt to discarded book pages to industrial glue. His collages have no focal point , as it requires to viewer to challenge their thinking about art and subject matter.
My artist statement is just this: to introduce a new form of absurdity into fine arts.
Ranee Taylor is a painter and mixed media artist from Johnson City, TN who utilizes oil paint, printmaking techniques, found materials, and textural additives to depict sensory experiences and memories inspired by nature. She received a BFA from the University of Tennessee, and is active in the Knoxville art community while working as an Assistant Gallery Director at a local gallery.
At the heart of my work is an examination of emotion and memory as bodily sensations, and how color, texture, and form can evoke those sensations. By drawing parallels between natural processes and human experiences, I seek to emphasize the connections between our lives and the natural world. As the world becomes increasingly digital, my work clings more and more to the tangibility of texture, referencing nature’s cycles of erosion and creation. Water erodes stone to sculpt impressive canyons, just as minerals from dissolved limestone drip from cave ceilings to form stalagmites. In life, the rushing waters of circumstance can shape one’s personal identity. Both material additives and imagery derived from nature in the work exhibit this connection. I am influenced by my upbringing in Southern Appalachia, where the striking mountains, trees, rivers, and caverns gave me a deep appreciation for all of the forms and textures found in nature.
Ranee-Taylor.com | Instagram @RaneeTaylor_
Originally from New York City, Marilyn Avery Turner received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 1966. At that time, her mediums were painting and collage. For the past 25 years, she has been concentrating on printmaking, specifically monoprinting and screen printing. Turner taught art for over 20 years in a variety of settings and has been involved with the Art Market Gallery since its inception in 1982. Besides showing work at this gallery, she exhibits her work in solo and group shows and participates in juried exhibitions throughout the US. In the last ten years, her work has been exhibited in over a third of the states in the US and has received awards in national exhibitions in Alabama, California, Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee.
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