“Collage has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. My great aunt had her own glue for pasting the images she cut out of magazines into scrapbooks. I used these scrapbooks to learn my first words, and from this point I was hooked. For me collage is a language, the medium I use to express my thoughts, hopes and dreams…"  Ann Harithas Artist statement 

The invention of collage and photo montage in the early part of the 20th Century has had a profound influence upon Modernism, both in its technical capacity as applied to the physical manipulation of art materials and processes and to the poetic possibilities in its manipulation of images. In 1931, in writing about photomontage from Cologne, Germany, Raoul Hausmann wrote, “Photomontage in particular with its opposing structures and dimensions (such as rough versus smooth, aerial view versus close-up, perspective versus flat plane) allows the clearest working out of the dialectical problems of form” The source materials for collages have been supplied by all sorts of printed matter, old illustrated prints in books, newspapers and especially photographic images from magazines. How artists have manipulated these found images, juxtaposing divergent images, has in essence created a visual poetry that has profoundly altered the context and denotation of their art. As a contemporary collage artist, Ann Harithas has uniquely extended our understanding of collage, especially as a medium ideally suited to an art form that responds to life and how the mind accesses the conflicting information that it registers.  

 Harithas was raised in South Texas and as a mature artist has made collage her exclusive mode of expression. She selects her images from hundreds of magazine illustrations and family photographs, including photographic self-portraits and brain scans in her series of collages titled Memory. Social, political and religious imagery are prevalent in her collages that are exquisitely crafted, executed images seamlessly adjoined, one next to the other. In viewing Harithas’ art we may be reminded of the Dada or Surrealist collage, the cut up collages of political protest or psychological disturbance made famous By Hannah Hock, John Heartfield and Max Ernst in the early part of the 20th century. But there are distinct differences between the collages by these masters and Harithas’ art. Harithas cuts out and superimposes relatively complete images of people or objects. She does not stress the exaggerated distortions that were popular with the Dada and Surrealist artists. Harithas’ collages of the 1990’s and early 2000’s are modest in scale, a result of using the images directly from the magazine illustrations, but the later collages from this exhibition make use of images that have been enlarged as digital prints. She also makes use of canvas and plexiglass as support for the digital enlargements, and solid color backgrounds that enhance the overlay of images. The bright red background in the beautiful work Oil Slick and the Hunter Green of Over Our Heads give these works Pop Art-like clarity.

By thematically tying her images to contemporary issues of disasters, wars, and puns on advertising, Harithas’ collages chronicle mass culture while also giving her collages the statues of visual icons. Once one sees a work like Katrina, it is hard to get the image out of your head of the golden horse flying across the composition of  a boat load of people paddling away in the wake of the storm. As a collage artist, Harithas is a very good editor. She knows instinctively when there has been enough said. In her work Iron Horse Cowboy there are just the figure of the man in a cowboy hat and a Renaissance angel driving a military tank. We the viewers can come up with all kinds of narratives based upon our contemplation of the cowboy, angel and tank. Deities are often pictured in Harithas’ collages, such as the stone cat statue in Feline Shrine and the kachina in Oil Slick, or even the golden horse of Katrina. The presence of these Deities adds a sense of the spiritual to the urgency and crassness of modern day life.

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