Edge-Work

“The copyright permission notes might be the most interesting section of Bella Li’s Argosy (2018) and Theory of Colours (2021)”

“Between DJs and memes, digital and analogue forms of cut and paste, the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility is the assemblage of the technologically reproducible”

“There is something rebellious about an art form that takes as its central problem where the edges of objects should be, and why they can’t be elsewhere”

“Collage is the art of using existence to question essence, of taking what already exists to reimagine what we think things mean, are, or do”

“Evoking Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, these visual poems are arguments for ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, and for responsibility in their construction.’”

“Collage defamiliarises, and in so doing, enables a flexibility of perspective”

“What is it to say, ‘there is nothing here?’ Physicist Karen Barad writes, ‘Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering… Matter in its iterative materialisation is a dynamic play of in/determinacy. Matter is never a settled matter.’”

“In Vibrant Matter, the scholar Jane Bennett points to Althusser’s suggestion that ‘political events are born from the chance meeting of atoms.’ The same might be said of the poetic event”