Rusty Shackleford creates collages, sculptures, and arrangements that investigate the relationship between image and form, engaging vintage printed matter to extrude its inherent qualities, of color, context, and nostalgia. The resulting images are delicately poised between abstraction and representation, paint and print. Shackleford does not treat his images preciously: he ravages them with swaths of paint, but he strikes a surprising equilibrium between readymade and intervention. His sculptures function similarly to his collages, where color and form, executed boldly in a minimal, Modernist style, integrate smoothly with the colors and forms in their surroundings.

Drawings by Alfred Steiner.

“Alfred Steiner, part intellectual draftsman, part pop culture surgeon. His works on hot press paper consisted of characters and scenes from the popular to the ambitious—Shaggy and Fred from Scooby Doo!, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Saint Anthony—all composed of jutting, blood-tipped bones and glistening, sinewy muscle. Profiles were assembled not with soft lines but with femurs, horses galloped not with hooves but on bare bone and demons brandished swords of muscle over prostrate outlines of pus and blood. Steiner creates a disorienting, dreamy and disturbingly beautiful feast for the eyes, calling to mind large masterworks of surgeons operating in an amphitheater, though one believes it is Steiner whose work operates on us, rather than vice versa. By creating instantly recognizable outlines from the most vital and basic parts of human anatomy, Steiner forces us to look at the culture around us while acknowledging the literal cultures within us.” -Sarah Hassan

As a part of Rhizome’s Seven on Seven, Ryan Trecartin and David Karp created riverofthe.net, a collection of 10 seconds or less community submitted videos. Trecartin, probably today’s most important video artist, and David Karp, creator of tumblr, were brought together, along with several other artists and technologists, by Rhizome back in 2010. Anyone can easily submit, and the more videos the better, because one of the only negative aspects is seeing videos you’ve already viewed before. It’s an incredibly simple and effective idea, which showcases videos that are typically more interesting than most video art out there.

Lisa Nilsson’s works renders the densely squished and lovely internal landscape of the human body in cross sections. Her materials are Japanese mulberry paper and the gilded edges of old books. They are constructed by a technique of rolling and shaping narrow strips of paper called quilling or paper filigree. Quilling was first practiced by Renaissance nuns and monks who made artistic use of the gilded edges of worn out bibles, and later by 18th century ladies who made artistic use of lots of free time.

Distortion, illusion, and psychedelic alterations can all be found in the hand cut collage work of Lola Dupré. My favorites are the well known images that she re-imagines in her trippy explosive cut paper interpretations like the above drawing by M.C. Escher.

Stunning fashion collages by Vanessa Lamounier de Assis.

Portlander/Swede, Edward Jeffrey Kriksciun staged a wonderful show featuring paper cutouts at Portland’s tremendous space, Nationale, in 2009. In November of last year, he came back to Nationale to exhibit drawings and collage that give us an idea of what Saul Steinberg’s work might look like if he were still around.