Matt Greenwell, left, and Ron Buffington work on “Just In (Out of Your Mouth)” in their studio space on McCallie Avenue. Photo by Angela Foster.
A huge photo of a priest giving last rites to a body in a rowboat stands to the left of a large photo of a praying mantis. A photo of a Shaker table is on the right.
Split logs. A colossal green crystal. A flying bat. A star-nosed mole.
And that’s just a single wall of the enormous collage created by two professors at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Ron Buffington, UC Foundation professor in painting and drawing, and Matt Greenwell, UC Foundation professor in graphic design, have been working on a collage that can fill a room.
“We were really interested in prototyping this idea of a fully immersive collage environment rather than just a picture, a collage you walk into and can experience from multiple vantage points. And it shifts as you move through the space,” Buffington said.
Titled “Just In (Out of Your Mouth),” the project’s first public installation opens Saturday, Jan. 6, in Nashville’s COOP Gallery and runs through Jan. 27.
Scanning photos from old magazines, catalogs, advertisements and instruction manuals, they’ve spent about 18 months working on the piece. The artists said there’s no ultimate message in their innovation except what viewers take away for themselves.
“We’re not trying to create anything like a traditional narrative.” Greenwell said, “By dislodging images from their conventional functions and contexts they can be guided—in conversation with one another—towards new and unexpected relationships.
The hope is that everyone comes away with a personal interpretation.
“I feel like it’s more mining when we go through our materials—and we have a kind of ‘desktop session,’ I would call it—where we’re just going through publications and drawing materials out,” he said. “We’re just sort of responding to kind on a gut level.”
Buffington said that placing images that have no direct connection to each other—either by subject, imagery or purpose—is one of the foundations of the piece.
“We take one thing out of context and position it in relation to another thing out of context,” he said. “We call them ‘fragments,’ and then we unite them in some way, and we try to create something like a stable new formation, but there’s something inherently unstable. They’re also haunted by those original contexts.”
As an example, he points to a portion of the collage that has an image of wax museum figures of Prince Philip and the late Queen Elizabeth II at Princess Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles. Except for the long train of her wedding gown, Diana is covered by an upside-down photo of an 18th-century sailing ship off the coast of Antarctica.
The ship was on an expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott, who died on an Antarctic expedition in mysterious circumstances. Buffington and Greenwell saw a connection between Scott and Princess Diana.
“These images circle around one another, drawing latent meaning to the surface,” Buffington said. “We were really interested in what happens when you combine these two images because you might think of the tragedy of Diana and certainly this sort of tragic expedition. They’re haunted by this context, and they start to bring things out of one another.”
Working on a collage is a fluid process, the two artists said. A photo or image that works one day may not work the next. It’s a combination of fun and frustration.
“The work is never settled. We will leave the studio one day and come back the next and it’s impossible not to tinker with it. This is part of what makes it rewarding,” Greenwell said.
“I think you can feel pretty settled about something, then get a good night’s sleep and come back and kind of reimagine or recalibrate. That’s pretty normal.”
The give-and-take artistic aspects of the project make it impossible to put a completion date on it but also make the process very exciting, the pair said.
“A distinct feature of creative research is its open-endedness,” Buffington said. “Matt and I could never have anticipated many of the most compelling developments of this project to date.”
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Photo gallery by Angela Foster
