Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of Jean Conner’s collages at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. Catch this show if you can! Author Genevieve Quick calls the artist’s work “strongly provocative” and notes, “[Conner’s] confidence and skill in selection, placement, and juxtaposition… create surprising amounts of visual play, leading to strong formal compositions and intriguing ideas.” This article was originally published on February 5, 2015.

Jean Conner. Untitled (Mother Daughter), 1980; paper collage; 13½ x 9¾ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Paule Anglim.

At Gallery Paule Anglim, Jean Conner presents thirteen meticulously crafted collages created over an almost fifty-year period. While the world has dramatically changed in Conner’s lifetime, much remains the same: Global and spiritual themes remain relevant, as do the banality and mysteriousness of domestic spaces. Assembled from magazine pages, Conner’s collages demonstrate her striking skill in juxtaposing images in both maximalist compositions and quietly restrained works. In bringing together disparate imagery, Conner creates intriguingly enigmatic formal compositions and narratives.

In the late ‘60s and ‘70s, mass-media coverage of the first moonwalk, the Vietnam War, President Nixon’s trip to China, and more brought the world into the homes of the average Americans. Through television and magazines, the world became less distant as Americans witnessed both triumphant and horrific events. Reflective of this social context and subject matter, Conner’s Arrival of the Magi (1971) is a complex and ambitiously scaled collage. As with the biblical story of three wise men traveling with offerings to witness the birth of Jesus, Conner assembles an international range of dancing figures, gift offerings, camels, embellished royalty, religious figures, and peasants in a desert landscape. As a departure from conventional religious imagery, Conner refrains from depicting Jesus. This omission creates space for a more secular reading; magi also have historical and etymological roots in Zoroastrianism, mysticism, astrology, and magic. While the magi are typically depicted piously leaning, gesturing, or looking toward the infant Jesus, Conner uses frontally posed figures, many of which expectantly stare back at the viewer. As mass media allowed Americans to begin looking at the world, this very medium also allowed it to look back at us.

Read the full article here.