Twelve21 Group Show: Conrad Crespin, Austin Moule and Madeleine Peck Wagner

“Collage,” author Donald Barthelme said in 1975, “is the central principle of all art in the 20th century.”

From Brion Gysin’s literary cut-ups to Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Tristan Tzara’s Dada poetry to Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis’ pop-tune mashups, it’s undeniably true that the assemblage of found elements to make an artistic statement rose to prominence in the last century and has continued into this one – perhaps it’s an inevitable side effect of the total media saturation we now live in. (If you’re interested in reading more about literary/musical/visual collage, I highly recommend Jonathan Lethem’s staggering essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.”) Twelve21’s latest show explores those magpie visual tendencies while also proving that when it’s done correctly – as art, not theft – collage is always more than just the sum of its component parts.

Conrad Crespin and Austin Moule work in classic mixed-media collage style – found objects, images and text fragments juxtaposed to pull a strong new signal from random visual noise. And when we say Moule’s work is extremely reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s, it’s not meant as a jab, but simply part of that whole “ecstasy of influence” thing.

Madeleine Peck Wagner combines spray paint, acrylics, graphite and tape on birchwood boxes – an abstract series of monuments to bridges and overpasses, which Wagner sees as “a metaphor for transition and change.”