REVIEW: Sometimes the bringing together can be preposterous; a review of Kevin Sampsell’s collage and poetry text, “I Made An Accident”
Image from “I made An Accident” by Kevin Sampsell, courtesy the artist and CLASH Books.
REVIEW
Sometimes the bringing together can be preposterous;
A review of Kevin Sampsell’s collage and poetry text, “I Made An Accident”
Paperback, $24.99
CLASH Books
By Meghan Lamb
Every writer who has written a book knows the terror of post-book creative anxiety, the question of, “What’s next? What do I do now?”. For Kevin Sampsell, this creative anxiety set in after touring his novel This is Between Us. Though he was “working” on another novel (in the sense that he had a Doc on his computer he increasingly dreaded opening), he struggled with the idea of sitting down and performing the conscious labor of writing. In the course of “taking a break” from his novel to experiment and “have fun” with language, Sampsell turned to collage, purchasing stacks of vintage National Geographic, Life, and Saturday Evening Post magazines from a local thrift store. As Sampsell delved deeper and deeper into collaging, however — studying the works of John Stezaker, Jesse Treece, and Sarah Eisenlohr — he felt further and further away from the act of novel writing. He began to embrace collage as a new and exciting expression of his creative drives: to play, to cut, to collect, to re-assemble, to juxtapose, to defamiliarize, to blend, to archive.
In many ways, I Made An Accident (Sampsell’s hybrid book of collages and poems) is a tribute to its own assemblage, to the spirit of (re)assemblage. It’s roughly divided into different eras of work, including pieces from Sampsell’s “early work” — which mostly consists of “unaltered photos with [cut-up] headline words over the top” despite his recognition that “those pieces aren’t very inventive” — to his later, more radically altered, torn, shredded, deconstructed collage structures. There’s no formal timeline given to his work on the page, however: no dates, no clearly-defined chronology, no table of contents. To “read” his book is to curiously page through a scrapbook-like amalgam of words and images, to discover — and to be continuously surprised by—the creative intuition that moved one thing next to another.
I Made An Accident is not merely an anthology of collages, but a playful examination of what collaging can be, both for the viewers who perceive the collage and the creators who perceive the collage’s raw material. In this spirit, one of the first written texts that appears in I Made An Accident (in the premiere section entitled “Hello, transformants”) is a talk with John Stezaker on the act of collaging: a talk that Sampsell has cut up, enjambed, and bricolaged into a poem. The collaged voice of Stezaker invites us to consider the ways we project lived experiences onto the acts of looking, making, “bringing together,” and “turning upside down”:
Sometimes I’m drawn to images that are
pulling apart
I call those betrayals
Marriage is a word I use a lot
I am trying to heal those divisions
Sometimes the bringing together
can be preposterous
Can that be art?
Turning a picture upside down?
It’s not always to do with a happy marriage
When you look at someone in the face
you’re looking behind them
The collaged image that appears next to this collaged poem likewise features the “marriage” of a “pulling apart” image and a gesture of “coming together.” The background of the image is consumed by a sky-shattering crash of lightening that appears to explode the composition from its very center. Beneath this crash, however, a collaged-in figure appears to be “drawing” the lightening onto the page he faces, controlling its explosion with a fine-tipped pen.
Image from “I made An Accident” by Kevin Sampsell, courtesy the artist and CLASH Books.
To collage — as this image suggests — is to contain the colossal: an attempt to “heal” rifts, divisions, and dissonances that is, by nature, “preposterous.” To collage is also to illustrate the tensions we perceive between images and ideas, and to encourage a kind of reflective parataxis. A violent explosion can be such a delicate drawing. A delicate drawing can be such a violent explosion.
To illustrate these tensions, Sampsell uses — and borrows, and re-appropriates — several different strategies:
He juxtaposes similar images, compositions, color schemes, and visual themes, as per these side-by-side collages featuring “black and white guys in the mountains.” I particularly admire his plays on notions of spectacle and spectators viewing a spectacle (with the crowd looking on at the two men wrestling as though taking in a natural wonder).
Image from “I made An Accident” by Kevin Sampsell, courtesy the artist and CLASH Books.
He shows us a kind of “before and after” using deconstructed elements of the same image (or even just using the same image, as with these two pieces).
Image from “I made An Accident” by Kevin Sampsell, courtesy the artist and CLASH Books.
Other pieces derive much of their composition from acts of destruction: the cutting out of figures, the carving out of absences, the punching of holes, and the tearing of shreds.
Image from “I made An Accident” by Kevin Sampsell, courtesy the artist and CLASH Books.
My personal favorites, however, are the collages where the act of destruction and deconstruction nourishes a special kind of intimacy with the images (or, perhaps, exposes a layer of intimacy that one might not appreciate in the image’s whole / original form.
Image from “I made An Accident” by Kevin Sampsell, courtesy the artist and CLASH Books.
Compositions like these seem particularly germane to Stezaker’s notion of collaging as a “marriage:” a union of elements that might seem somewhat “preposterous” on the surface, but which ultimately defamiliarizes visuals that might otherwise slip past our attention (or that we might assign some subconscious rote value to). This “marriage”— or perhaps re-union — of snipped-up parts beckons us to consider each bit — and the make-up of bits — with a transformed imagination.
Ultimately, this is the prevailing sense with which I emerge from I Made An Accident: the playfully transformed imagination, the freedom to play, to explore, and see new things in my own environment. I believe this is the feeling that Sampsell (who leads his own “Open Collage Night” that bring together people from “all skills and backgrounds”) wants his readers and viewers to emerge with as well. Collage is not a stale form to be mastered, but rather a means of interacting — and encouraging interaction — with other texts. To collage is always — in effect — to perform the “preposterous”: to unify things that should not be unified, to explode — and revivify — our understanding of what goes together.
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