Review: Echo Contemporary Art’s three collage exhibitions sing in perfect harmony

On January 10, three collage exhibitions featuring an abundance of dreamscapes and multimedia installations opened at Echo Contemporary Art. The show is composed of two solo exhibitions, including Candace Caston’s Midnight Train and Lewis Foster’s Variations on a Dream, alongside Cohesive Chaos, an invitational collage exhibition featuring artists AP Faust, Charity Hamidullah, Dayna Thacker, Karen Graffeo, Marryam Moma, Merrilee Challiss and Nyala Yvonne.

Images of transit unfold on either side of the space as you enter the gallery. Caston’s works evoke movement, even in their placement, occupying two opposing walls like roads. The images depict travel on one side and the process of settling down on the other. Caston’s collages tell the story of one specific period of time: her family’s move from New Orleans to Atlanta following Hurricane Katrina. 

In Caston’s Rear View, deep purples evoke twilight. A pair of eyes look straight out through a rearview mirror, the image’s focus like an anchor. In the reflection, the wind pulls the palm trees sideways and a bird is pictured mid-flight. One portion of the rearview image is covered in dim light, while the other slowly fades into a closing sky. Stars and city lights blur together and the road boundaries begin to look like clouds. 

The neighboring works are self-contained, centering an image that holds the tension of both movement and stillness. Caston shared that she begins each work by hand painting paper with gouache while thinking of a specific memory before flipping through magazines and looking for images that spark a feeling of remembrance. She sometimes incorporates family photos. 

In Foster’s work, the use of glass is an intentional decision. “I think the principles I am discussing are fragile and transparent, kind of like glass,” he explained. His exhibit Variations on a Dream takes its title from the musical concept of variations on a theme that is repeated and treated in different forms. In his case, the recurring themes are masculinity, race and sexuality, with pieces named after types of dreams: prophetic, lucid, recurring. Foster’s art focuses on exploring surrealism and afrofuturism while centering homoeroticism. 

In Recurring, a grouping of art nouveau-inspired geometric frames within the piece create patterns, showcasing Foster’s desire to present in “a really clear and cohesive way.” The background offers a cool-toned gradient of teal to light green. Four men encircled in the corners of the frame look toward the center, where warmer splashes of color create a delightful concentration of energy: man, nature and body. 

A serpent curls around the figure in the center, and snake-reminiscent patterns appear throughout the piece. Foster says he is drawn to the motif of snakes shedding their skin. “There’s the whole shedding and renewal thing. I’m very interested in that,” said Foster. “Also, they are really good indicators of societal pressure, because we just decided that this creature was evil.”

Meanwhile, Cohesive Chaos highlights the artists’ passions and talents as they tell a variety of stories through the medium of collage.

Moma’s work depicts a different play on movement, one where it is guided by the fixed gaze of her women — quieter, yet intentional. The works, which she calls her Nomadic series, were created while on a vacation with her family. I was transfixed by the figures’ steady, peering eyes. “At the core, it’s about elevating the Black body, specifically the Black woman,” explained Moma. “I want to uplift her, empower her through my work, give her space to live in luxury, be frivolous, be playful — all these spaces where we generally don’t find ourselves in reality.” 

In Yvonne’s Hope is a Thing with Feathers, the body rests in nature, echoing themes of isolation that she often considers when making her art. The blend of sky and lush vegetative land pop with color, their contrasting halves enveloping the figure. Flecks of red and pink take form as an underlapping image and appear as clouds. I took the surrealist bird head as a gesture of flight and of hope.

Nearby, Faust shared that his works fall into two categories: surrealist dreamscapes that allow him to explore the subconscious and process emotions and cut-and-paste collages that can deconstruct and reclaim through social commentary. “I think a powerful thing about collage is that you’re taking something that’s purpose is to either sell you something or make you feel a type of way about yourself through magazines and advertisements, and you literally destroy that and create your own narrative,” said Faust.

Faust and Moma both speak to collage as an evolving process.

“I don’t know what the name of the piece is going to be until it’s done. Sometimes, I don’t glue them down immediately because I can come back next week,” Moma said.

“Something can be two, three pieces of paper, but what everyone else doesn’t see is the thousands of iterations that came for you to settle on that truth, that face, that feeling,” Faust added.

Hamidullah incorporates scraps of fabric in her work. “I feel like fabric holds memory,” said Hamidullah. “I use a lot of things that remind me of home: linen, burlap, my heritage coming from the South and also me honoring me finding my way back to the South.” She weaves in thread to tell the story of a journey, while pieces of cardboard boxes serve as signifiers of change. In doing so, she hopes to create a visual language to communicate and connect with the viewer. 

Challiss layers with gouache on paper, pointing to the “sensuous and tactile nature of paper,” and Thacker’s work features depictions of vessels. Thacker said she is inspired by the Buddhist explanation of the universe as a vessel, and, by extension, people as corresponding vessels for the universe and the grander relationship between internal and the cosmic realms.

In her work titled Spiritual Self-Portrait, multimedia artist Graffeo continues her explorations of the body “as an undecorated, liberated vessel for art.” A group of nine optical crystal blocks sit arranged in a line, with an image scan of a body in each. The images appear to be frozen or floating. The outside of the crystals are etched with fragments from Graffeo’s journal. Graffeo made the piece while she was living in Romania years ago, and, when she happened to come across a studio with a 3D scanner, she instantly wanted to try it out. The piece emerged intuitively, guided by what she describes as a sense of “magic and spirit.”  

“All I had was myself, and the idea to liberate a photograph away from opacity and work with dimension,” Graffeo said. Magnifying glasses invite viewers to read Graffeo’s words. When I try to photograph the piece, the text flickers and evades the lens of the camera. True to the nature of collage, the work is ephemeral and luminous in those moments face-to-face with the viewer.

“I think collage is something that everybody has made in the past,” said Echo Contemporary Art owner Jessica Helfrecht. “I think when everybody comes and sees these — they’re so elevated and beautiful and the artists are so talented — that they’ll find it an approachable medium.”

Midnight Train, Variations on a Dream and Cohesive Chaos will remain on view at Echo Contemporary Art through February 9.

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Mitali Singh is an Atlanta-based writer who is passionate about exploring the intersections between the arts and culture. She is currently a student at Emory University, studying English and creative writing. Her poems have been published in Eunoia Review and FEED.