Collagism and Shuby return to London’s West End on Thursday 11th June 2015 for a joint exhibition of their latest works at Scream on Eastcastle Street.
Collagism (aka Holly-Anne Buck) and Shuby met whilst exhibiting in a group show in London's East End. Both artists were captured by each others work and the parallel that they both use bananas as a motif running through their work. They instantly hit it off, and after their meeting decided that on Holly-Anne’s return to homeland Australia they would embark on a long distance collage collaboration.
This developed into a series of colourful, multimedia pop-art works, shared across the seas between two artists, with no specific boundaries on materials or subject. Each artist would work on a piece themselves up until a point and then post the artwork across the world to the other who would then continue working on the same piece. They became excited by the surprise results of each other’s influence on the collaborative works and a relationship of two strong female artists was born.
As a result, Collagism and Shuby have been invited by Scream Editions to showcase these original collaborations as limited edition, hand-embellished prints, alongside a new body of their own works - including one-off large pieces on board, prints and multimedia. In these new works they both explore themes of sexuality, subversion, media, icons and celebrity.
Together Collagism and Shuby, for this show, make a formidable pair, and celebrate their bold individual styles and their unique collaborations to give us an assemblage of strong colours and humorous imagery in an explosion of pop culture.
Both Collagism and Shuby are known for their individual style of work, both strong in imagery;
Collagism works with portraiture using collaged imagery; presenting figures that have not been seen before, yet trigger a memory on some level.
Delving into a world of magazines and pop culture she collages her own reconstruction of this world exploring beauty, health and the depiction of women.
Each artwork has a personal story - revealing wants, needs and desires - although it is left unclear whether these relate to a fictional or real persona.
She draws inspiration from the now, and presents her work glossy and sharp using the most current technology in printing and multimedia.
Collagism creates portraits that challenge who, what and where we are in the current moment, using often-surprising juxtapositions of imagery.
Shuby’s work is textural and painterly and draws from imagery from the past, using traditional methods of layering, paint and print making.
In this body of work she uses a mixture of vintage movie posters and her own imagery which are then layered, reworked and mixed together to create tension and narrative between text and images.
Her signature banana and masked bunny are woven throughout the collages sending up and subverting the dramatic subject matter.