Collage and the Reassembled Whole

Description

This two-day studio course uses jazz music at the forefront to explore how fragmentation, reassembly, and reconstruction can generate abstract composition from the personal archive. Artists will test how composed images carrying memory, identity, and cultural meaning transpose once they are cut, layered, obscured, repeated, and thus recomposed. The course approaches memory as dynamic and reconstructive rather than fixed, and it approaches the archive not as stable evidence but as a field of fragments to be interpreted, rearranged, and made newly legible. Across Saturday and Sunday, students will develop a body of small studies, a worked sketchbook, and either three to five stronger reconstructed collages or one larger resolved work. About the Instructor: DHANTÉ (he/him) is a collage and installation artist based between Brooklyn, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin. His work investigates how memory is constructed, fragmented, and reassembled, especially as it begins to decline. Informed by his relationship with his grandmother, whose recollections shift, repeat, and blur each time they are told, DHANTÉ approaches memory not as something fixed to preserve, but as something unstable, partial, and continuously reorganizing itself. This condition becomes a model for his studio process, where images are built, interrupted, and reassembled in ways that mirror the instability of memory itself. His collages create a temporary sense of order, asking viewers to encounter the work as whole while being denied access to the image it came from. In this way, the viewer is placed in a position similar to his own, searching for continuity inside a system where certainty has already begun to fall apart. His practice extends this inquiry toward the Black archive, which he approaches as an inheritance shaped by absence, fragmentation, and continual re-authorship. Instagram: @DHANTEBUNBURY