Boone – Hank Forman’s view, the art mediums of collage and assemblage – with their juxtapositions of fragmentary found images, texts and objects – constitute an appropriate metaphor for contemporary life. “Our lives today are collages. It’s how we create who we are,” foreman said. He is the director and chief curator of Appalachian State University’s Turchin Center for the Visual Arts.

People are pulling things from here and there, whether it be religious ideas, art ideas or lifestyle ideas. Postmodernism has trained us to do this kind of hunt-and peck in order to create ourselves, in much the same way that collages or assemblages are created.”

Foreman was talking about the Turchin Center’s latest exhibition, “Sum of the Parts: Assemblage and Collage, “on view through May 29. The show consists of about 130 works by 14 contemporary artists whose work largely relies on either or both collage and assemblage. Foreman said that he considers them to be essentially the same combinative medium, differing only in the number of dimensions involved. An assemblage, in his view is a three-dimensional collage.

“Sum of the Parts” is the third large exhibition the Turchin Center has presented since it opened last May, Foreman envisioned it as a contemporary sequel to the center’s previous, art-historical show, “The Omnipotent Dream: Man Ray, Confluences and Influences,” which last fall brought together collages, assemblages and other works by Man ray (1890-1976) and some of his dadaist and surrealist peers. The latter exhibition showed the impact that those early 20th-century artists had on the way art created, especially with the introduction of collage and assemblage, Foreman said.

“It was a time of introducing new processes, exploring new ways to create art and revising ideas about what art is.” He said that he intended “The Omnipotent Dream” to set people up for looking at the cycle of how artists create their work and reinvent their roles. “this is a similar kind of period for artistic production, because today artists are looking for new ways to interact with their communities and envisioning them selves in different kinds of roles, “ he said, comparing the early 21st century to the early 20th.

Collage and assemblage began as avant-garde strategies intended to offend bourgeois sensibilities but have since developed into something of a tradition. “Sum of the Parts” reflects this fact, foreman said, while also revealing that innovation continues to occur with-in this century tradition.

“Even though it’s become a tradition, it’s adaptable to new technologies, “ he said, noting among other developments the advent in recent years of digital collage, a medium that is incorporated in works by two of the artists represented in this show, David Brady and Pat Street.

Foreman said that in organizing the show he cast a wide curatorial net, contacting galleries across the country, conducting Internet research and considering hundreds of works for possible inclusion. In the process, he said, he was surprised at the numbers of artists he found to be working almost exclusively with collage and /or assemblage. Also surprising to him, he said was the high quality of much of the work. “This is a national investigation, a national trend, not just pockets of people working here and there,” he said. “In addition to a trend, it’s become a business.”

Digital collage in particular has become so popular, he said, that there are now a number of Web sites that specialize in providing source materials for collage artists.

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