Returning and Returning (Tender Disturbances), 2025
Collages on postcards and photographs
Slemmons collection
My mother, who was in the Polish resistance during World War II, would say from time to time, “things are going so well, I hope nothing bad will happen.” There is promise, but also haunting uncertainty in the photographs from the Slemmons collection that resonated strongly with me. Most of the postcards I worked with are the work of Charles Libby and Son, commercial photographers who documented life, architecture, and landscapes in and around Spokane WA. They were hired to document the development of the Coulee/Mason City company town and Coulee Dam project which brought laborers from across the country, seeking work during the great depression. They even did aerial photography and had photographed Charles Lindbergh at one time. I was struck by the empty town, hotel, hospital, and brutal landscapes, and started to get a sense of what life might have been like for the people who had come to work and build the city. I have collaged slices of older and contemporary architectural and abstract sculptural elements onto the Mason City townscapes, buildings and portraits. A gateway next to a boarding house suggests a portal into another reality. A twisted spiral staircase within the skeleton of a building suggests an x-ray of the torso of a young woman posed for a studio photograph or barracks. Pyramidic sculptural forms, like teepees or sails pierce the surface of Lake Coulee. These collages are visual poems that tie in with “Tender Disturbances”, my current series of collages and drawings that I’ve been working on over the last couple of years- explorations of beauty, intimacy, fragility, and transgression.
Katharine (Kate) Schutta is a Chicago-based artist. Her paper collages and photographs are visual poems – explorations of art, intimacy, and transgression. Culling, cropping, repositioning and realigning found objects and images from auction catalogues, magazines, books, and various printed materials, she collides contemporary art and art history, science, technology and the natural world.