Jay Hodgson has worked for more than three decades in the arts. He's worked on three records nominated for Juno awards, played on platinum and gold certified albums, and even won a Governor General's award for his PhD research in the area of record production and media ecology. He's an avid fan of analog paper collage, and the weird brain states that the medium provides. His most recent showings were at the Van Der Plas Gallery in the lower east side of Manhattan, as part of its Vor Kunst exhibit in November of 2020, and then again as part of the gallery's Spring Salon in August of 2021; at the Galeria Start, in Warsaw (Poland), as part of their World Absurdist exhibit in Spring of 2021; and at the Divulgarti Gallery in Genoa (Italy), as part of their exhibit "Il Bivio" ("The Crossroads"), which was curated by Loredana Tristan, in June and July of 2021. He has recently shown in Milan, at the MADS Gallery, and will be showing in December of 2022 at the Gaudi Gallery in Barcelona, Spain. He shows daily on instagram (@jay_hodgson_collage) and can be fount at his website: jayhodgson.com
Artist Statement
There is a tension between familiarity and strangeness in analog collage, in reworking obviously 'found' or 'pre-existing' materials into new symbols and shapes, that I can't really achieve in any other medium. The effect is to produce works that are a lot like the way Brian Eno described ambient music, that is, works that are as ignorable as they are interesting. Using markers of mass produced culture to provoke alienation and disjuncture, viewers are at once familiar with, and unbalanced by the (re)arrangement of, analog collage. Also: the feel of the exacto knife, the cutting of paper, the taping, gluing, the kinetic and visceral activity of analog collage making itself is also extremely exciting.
Education
University of Alberta
PhD
- Music
2002
- 2006
I won a big fancy schmancy Governor General's Academic Medal for my dissertation, and was nominated for a CAGS-UMI national award.
Skills
collage
cutandpaste
visualremixing
visualcratedigging
Exhibitions
Divulgarti Gallery
June
2021
Genoa, Italy
"A crossroad is the image that best represents the sensation of uncertainty caused by a decision. If we imagine to arrive at a crossroad where two paths take form, this sudden existential doubt is a way where two faces of our personality dialogue and face; in this exhibition of contemporary art, our artists will propose artworks that follow their point of view on this concept, also in their declination inside the social environment."
Loredana Trestin (curator)
Van Der Plas Gallery
November
2020
Manhattan, New York
NEW YORK, NY) From November 23rd to December 2nd, Van Der Plas Gallery is pleased to present the works of sixty-two local and international artists. We have asked artists to submit works inspired by their subjective interpretations of the Hegelian concept of ‘pre-art’, or ‘Vor Kunst’. ‘Pre-art’ (Vorkunst), according to Hegel, arises through the direct and primal expression and representation of forms and symbols. “Hegel’s account of symbolic art encompasses the art of many different civilizations and shows his considerable understanding of, and appreciation for, non-Western art. In contrast to ‘Art proper’ The sphere of ‘pre-art’ comprises art that rests on a relatively abstract conception of spirit.” (Hegel’s Aesthetics) We have asked artists to create freely and directly without inhibition through their own unique visual languages. We encourage artists to embrace their own artistic self-expression in relation to the primitive ‘pre-art’ of forms and symbols described by Hegel. We welcome primal creative self-expression and uninhibited experimentation.
The works in this exhibition expand across a wide range of materials, formats, and styles. In his work “Transcendence,” Lower East Side street artist, Will Power, puts a NYC street culture spin on traditional Christian iconographies. A pearl white cherub kneels piously with his “MC rosary beads” in the artwork’s foreground, while the flame of NYC past and present flickers beside him on a spray paint can.
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