Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Conceptual Creations: Collage and Assemblage, a group exhibition featuring New Orleans based artists who create work through transformative materiality. Collage has continued to be an important means of expression throughout art history and is particularly relevant during times of social unrest. The artists included in this exhibition experiment by embracing chance, accident, and improvisation to create works that are surprising and unanticipated. Drawing on such methods, each artist makes unique contributions to the show, which includes works by Scott Andresen, James Henderson, Regina Scully and Robert Tannen.
 

Scott Andresen’s mixed media works explore themes of repair. He collects swatches of spent sandpaper with their marks, tears and sanded off paint pigment. He then repairs each piece by mounting and patching torn areas with gold or silver leaf, much like that of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold. Andresen has exhibited in over 50 group and solo exhibitions at the Jack Tilton Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Exit Art, Naples Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum, among others. He has attended residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, Socrates Sculpture Park and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, while also receiving grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the Jacob Javits Fellowship. He has works in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design, NY.
 

James Henderson’s work explores the concept of memory and nostalgia. Utilizing found imagery as a starting point, he collages and layers his mixed media paintings. The inclusion of imagery from vintage photographs becomes Henderson’s visual language through which to depict the notion of how one’s past experiences, emotions and personal archeology greatly shape one’s identity. Henderson’s new works on paper use plaster and roofing tar to secure the fading images printed on vellum. Henderson has exhibited at the Ogden Museum, LA and Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA, and his works have been included in film and television programs such as Bad Girls Club, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I, and The First.
 

Regina Scully has worked in a variety of sculptural media prior to devoting her pursuits primarily to painting. She often thinks of her painting as a 3-dimensional field she is going into with pieces of wire, cloth, objects, wood, and little parts that she has made. In this new body of work, the artist continues to push the conversation between representation and abstraction by incorporating pieces and parts of real objects in exploratory ways. Piano beams, metal cords, cloth, paper and screen among other objects are included in these paintings. Her sculptural elements and objects begin to represent 3-dimensional strokes of paint and 3-dimensional figures that feel painterly. Scully is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant Award in 2017. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and had a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2017. Scully’s paintings are in private and public collections including 7 World Trade Center, the Microsoft Art Collection, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation Collection, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. 
 

Robert Tannen is an artist, community activist, industrial designer, and economic and urban development design specialist and planner. His artworks throughout the decades have reflected civic, urban and environmental concerns. His innovative works encompass a variety of materials such as beach debris, animals suspended in plastic bags of formaldehyde, furniture covered in rags dipped in resin, tractor tires, concrete blocks, and sheet metal “archisculptures.” Tannen has exhibited extensively throughout the nation in both galleries and museums including the Institute of Contemporary Art, MA; New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LA; Mississippi Museum of Fine Arts, MS, Contemporary Arts Center, LA and the Santa Monica Museum of Contemporary Art, CA. His four museum retrospectives emphasized environmental, urban planning, and architectural elements, including the current interactive "BOX-CITY" exhibition at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana.