The Weird Show Broadcast

Diane Meyer is a Los Angeles based artist whose work combines photography and embroidery, creating mixed media objects that questions the idea of memory, our construction of history and our relationship with the past.

Her artworks are part photography and part hand-stitched pixelated color patterns that at the same conceal and reveal information, making us think what’s lost and what’s gained in this media translation where a thread takes the place of an image.

Diane's work has been exhibited in dozens of galleries in the United States and abroad and is part of important art collections. And while it is not traditional collage, her work has been collected in titles as central to the genre as The Age of Collage, published by Gestalten.

And as there is nothing we like more than exploring the boundaries of what we understand as collage, we talked to her to learn more about her work, influences and process.

Anthony Zinonos was born in South Africa and lived in Cyprus, Greece, the UK and in California and seems that all this moving from place to place made him realise that the less he needed, the easier to move forward. And, inspired by his own life experience and a John Stezaker exhibition he attended when he was still in college, he decided to make restrictions the main tool to shape his artistic identity. After stripping his work of everything superfluous, Anthony began making collages with a single (usually very small) photographic clipping and a piece of colored paper. The “Less is more” ethos… taken to the extreme.

Zinonos’ minimal approach to collage conquered the world more than a decade ago, first via social media and then in art exhibitions and working worldwide for very prestigious editorial and commercial clients.

So this week we’re talking with Anthony to learn more about his background, work, ideas… and a bit about his famous Pugs.

This episode was produced, edited and sound designed by Máximo Tuja aka Max-o-matic.

James Gallagher is one of our personal heroes. We owe this guy so much.He was one the few artists that in the late 90s and the early 2000’s championed collage in a time that the medium was far from being relevant or popular.

His curatorial work carried out in the late 2000’s and early 10s took collage to a new level. With the Cutters New York, Berlin and Cork exhibitions, and in the Cutting Edges book, published by Gestalten, he showcased a selection of artists from all around the world working with appropriation art and collage in new and refreshing ways that inspired the collage renaissance that arrived just few years after.

James Gallagher is one of the reasons we do what we do. He had a huge influence in my work as an artist and in the creation of TWS back in 2010. He, in many ways, started all this, and we are glad we finally got to talk to him about everything.

Pelle Cass is a photographer who loves to defy the nature of his own practice.If what photography aims to do is to freeze a small fraction of a second in a single image, what Pelle does is to forget about the limits imposed by time and condense hours of activity into a single photo.

Mark Wagner makes art with money. I mean, he literally makes very intricate collages made entirely from deconstructed US dollar bills. His art involves both an extremely precise craft and a highly conceptual approach, exploring with his work the intersection of wealth, power, value and American identity.

During his career Mark has destroyed thousands of dollar bills not only to creates art, but also to start conversations and make us think about the nature and role in our life of something that we tend to see as almost natural and given, money.

Andrea is a Brooklyn based artist and editor. Her works combines collage, sculpture and found materials to elevate the overlooked and mundane via transformative physical processes. And, indeed, there’s a strong physical and material component to her work, with layers of paper, paint and other materials accumulating and forming abstract and expressive gestures.

Andrea is also the founder and editor or one of our favourite editorial adventures: Cut Me Up magazine, a participatory and curatorial project which publishes works created with artworks made by deconstructing and transforming the previous editions of the magazine.

Because we love Andrea’s work and projects, and because she’ll be joining the Weird Show team interviewing her favourite artists, we wanted to talk with her and find out more about her work and ideas.

There are two sides of Mac Premo. Mac the commercial films director that works for huge clients. And Mac, the artist making art stretching the limits of collage like no other. But there’s something in common on both sides : Mac, as he likes to say, is a stuff-maker.  The only thing is that stuff, in Mac’s world, can go from simple paper collages to delicate wood sculptures, films, giant installations, plays -which he writes and performs- and complex perpetual machines.  So, yes, he makes stuff. Beautiful and meaningful stuff in all forms, shapes and mediums.  And, on top of that, he makes us think and reflect on our own existence with the stuff he creates.

Based in Dever, Colorado, Mario Zoots in an artist that has been working with collage in its various forms for over a decade. His work is bold and extremely personal, but what we like the most about Mario is his relentless exploration of collage as a medium. While some artists work hard to find a trademark style that they can repeat endlessly, Mario goes just the opposite way. His work is always evolving and looking for new ways to represent his ideas, thoughts and histories. Mario is not afraid of trying new things and shifting his focus to new materials, techniques or conceptual approaches. It seems that the only things he really fears is repetition.

2020 was a year were the fact that black lives matter was sadly highlighted by police brutality and death.

In different areas, movements have been created to vindicate the situation of inequality and social injustice. And Black Collagist, an art incubator created as a platform to discover, facilitate and support black artists making collage, is definitely the one that caught our attention the most.

In this episode we spoke with writer and curator Teri Henderson, Black Collagists Founder and director, to discover more about the incubator, its mission goals and how does the art world looks for a black curator working in a collage related project.

Since it’s first edition in 2013, the artist Dennis Busch has partnered with the prestigious Berlin based publishing house, Gestalten, to put out the most relevant book series reviewing contemporary collage: The Age of Collage.

In this episode we are speaking with Francesca Gavin and Dennis Busch, editors of this series latest release: The Age of Collage 3.

Both editors have a very different profile and that’s part of the richness of the book. And that’s what’s great about these interviews. We’ll be facing the Age of Collage from two opposite perspectives and ways of approaching art and collage.