QUOTES FROM ARTICLES BY PETER FRANK:

Convergence Of Five: The Sound Of One Hand Making Art

"The clarity and dynamic poise of Georganne Aldrich Heller's collages fuse dada wit with the precise, lucid balance of constructivism, suggesting among other models the avant garde stage design of the 1910s and '20s."

In Fluence: The Aura Of Succession

"Georganne Aldrich Heller, Lark's student, reflects and in certain regards amplifies her teacher's responsivity to pop sources. Based in New York and Los Angeles, Heller is best known as a theatrical producer, responsible most notably for bringing contemporary Irish theater to these shores. As the daughter of legendary collector and patron Larry Aldrich, Heller has been around contemporary visual art all her life; it is, if anything, something of a surprise that she took up visual art well after establishing herself in an entirely different field. Not so surprising is the narrative thrust with which Heller invests her pictorial inventions, and, increasingly, the humanist (and sometimes feminist) themes her narrative bent advances.

Encouraged by Lark to rely on collage material and to indulge rather than suppress an already honed dramatic flair, Heller at first concentrated on evocative but essentially non-objective structures fashioned from found materials. Increasingly, she has coaxed suggestive form from these materials, to the point where she can describe entire narrative arcs through the subtle elaboration of fixed visual templates. Heller relies entirely on collage, not employing paint at all. In this regard, she marks a distinct evolution of practice away from her mentor's mentor's mentor – whom she has never met."

DA-DA or NOT?

"To be sure, in producing their work, Elize, Georganne Heller, and Lark depend on a fundamental visual logic, calling on their native abilities and training to guide them to natural coherency. But they experi- ment freely with formats and elements that can challenge not just their skills, but their imaginations, sending them onto new struc- tural and narrative paths. To be sure, they also make unabashed reference to the real world, as Elize and Lark do in their fantasy landscapes and Heller does in her figures.

Heller's cut-out-doll-like take on fashion, Lark's knowing embrace of a romantic spiri- tualism in her landscapes, and Elize's arch juxtapositions of images in space all play with the real world rather than curse it or mock it. "In a way," writes Lark of herself and her two comrades-in-collage, the three women "still have their lonely child inside them, wanting to play, making friends with their creations rather than with real people." If this is Dada, it is a gentled Dada for a new, perhaps more hopeful era."

Paper Ttrails: New Collage

"Many substances get swallowed into the act of collaging, but none is as basic to the collage process, conceptually and materially, as is paper. Collage per se is a paper-based medium, and – even though all of them work with other media – the seven artists showing here not only specialize in paperwork, but demonstrate a mastery of paper's modality; that is, they regard paper not simply as support, but as medium (and one imbued with social and historical meaning, even in the digital age). These artists may find or may choose their ingredients; they may lie their findings flat or let them hang or spring off the support; they may work sequentially, as if composing a book, or may work uniquely, as if spilling the contents of the mind and the world onto a single screen; they may work intimately, pulling our eyes into texts and structures at an almost microscopic level, or may work monumentally, as if collaging space itself. Even as it relies on paper as its point of departure and return, collage – certainly as practiced here – is an omnivorous method. Indeed, it is more than a method: it is a way of seeing, even a way of life"

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