Katie McCann and Marsha Balian
Oakland
December 7 & 8, 2024
For the winter installment of the biannual 2024 East Bay Open Studios, my partner and I beelined to see work by collagist Katie McCann. We’re both fans of collage art and follow McCann’s creations on Instagram, so we were eager to see her collages in real-life.
Surprised, we pulled up to an Arts and Crafts-style house, not a studio, as expected. It was a beautiful home, and owner Marsha Balian showed her art on paneled fabric room dividers in the expansive, sunlit kitchen, while McCann’s work displayed in the living room at a table and the same dividers as Balian.
The pieces that caught my eye straightaway were collage portraits that were direct references to the work of 16th century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a series McCann titled—what else—“Homage to Arcimboldo.” The most striking, “The Carnivore” (pictured above), was assembled of tiny paper cut-outs of cuts of meat, flowers, leaves, viscera, and animals, all expertly arranged to create the profile of a head; beautiful and one of many Arcimboldo-esque faces whose painstaking constructions were complex and intricate.
One can easily get lost in these collages. Up-close, the eye wanders from one minute part of their assemblage to another before stepping back to see the whole once again. “The Carnivore” held me in place for a long while. Every detail of its world was a world unto itself. McCann is an expert at the precise balancing act that is good collage.
McCann is fascinated by Victorian and Victorian-style prints. She creates her pieces from her extensive collection of antique books and prints, combined with newer images. These strange and beautiful collages possess an unexpected gravitas, a seriousness that deepens their otherwise whimsical compositions.
“I’m a lapsed Catholic,” McCann said. Soft-spoken, almost shy, she told me that she was born and raised in London, moving to the U.S. in 2000. Many of her collages are named for saints she’s fascinated by. My favorite of these was “Saint Gertrude”: a somber-looking child’s head on a bird’s body, crowned with a flower and a tiny parrot’s head, an eye within a blossom seeming to cry petal tears looking over it, all in subtle shades of purples, pinks, fuchsia, and red. I loved its faintly spooky quality.
Balian’s work complemented McCann’s, with her found objects for her pieces. Most of her work is on wood panels using paint, faux encaustic, and found objects like photographs, playing cards, and product wrappers. I was taken with “Mickey,” which reminded me of Joseph Cornell’s box assemblages. Balian’s cigar box piece contained a couple of clay figurines, a plastic bulb syringe with a little ball atop it, and a tiny collage she made on a matchbox. Above these trinkets on the open lid is an image of Mickey Mouse on a flattened shower cap box—boxes and boxes within boxes.
As it turned out, Joseph Cornell is one of Balian’s influences. She’s self-taught, now retired from almost four decades as a nurse practitioner, creating in her backyard studio. She described to me the elements of “Dear Bud,” a collage/painting that includes a found love letter written in pencil. After she’d applied faux encaustic to it, the graphite writing of the letter faded almost completely away, something she seemed a bit bummed out about. She also showed me a piece entitled “The Usefulness of a Clean White Shirt” that she claimed she “didn’t like,” hanging low on its room divider, which I found a bit odd as she had still chosen to display it.
Good collage and assemblage are difficult craft to master despite their seemingly simple appearance. It takes a vision utilizing negative space and requires constant adjustment and readjustment in order to realize a completed idea. I can only wonder at the hours one piece might require; the obsessiveness and patience needed to execute something that at first glance looks like one visual phrase is a craft not everyone is up for. But those who can do it well—creating new pieces of others—provide the viewer with a banquet of visual delights.
