Russian and Soviet and Current Collages 1920s – 1990s and 2009. Penn, C.  (2009 - ?) (Fig. 68). Russian and Soviet and Current Collages 1920s – 1990s and 2009.  Unique Altered Book. (Work in Progress). Collage, stamping and  drawing. 25.5cm x 24 cm x 4 cm.  Collection: Cheryl Penn.

Marcadé (2005, 7) writes of the Russian use of collage as ‘fracture’; “in Russian, texture is called “faktura”, or fracture [which] puts the accent on the materials, their characteristics, and the way they are worked by the artist”.  He goes on further to write that this particular form of visual representation “dismantled the fragments of susceptible reality to reassemble them within a new iconographic montage” (ibid).

I found the subject matter of the book  titled Russian and Soviet Collages 1920s – 1990s, relevant to the current global political and social situations we face. The global village deals with; the spirit of revolution, wars and rumors of wars,  the idealization of dictatorial leaders, poverty, fashion, industrialization, food shortages, farming and cross cultural pollination.  There is no new thing under the sun. By inserting new and current  fragments onto these Soviet images, I have moved their narrative from a particular area, a particular time and a particular subject matter, to 2009 where not much has changed.

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