Composite World

Andrea Burgay, Andrés Gamiochipi, Eva Lake, Paul Loughney, Steven Rudin, Paloma Trecka, Rochelle Voyles Satchel Projects is pleased to present Composite World, a group exhibition curated by Paul Loughney. Composite World brings together seven artists whose distinctive bodies of work reveal collage's rich formal and conceptual possibilities. The show includes works by Andrea Burgay, Andrés Gamiochipi, Eva Lake, Paul Loughney, Steven Rudin, Paloma Trecka, and Rochelle Voyles. In an era of relentless digital image circulation, the artists in Composite World turn to the tactile act of cutting, collecting, and recombining printed matter. Working primarily with analog collage, they find and reassemble magazines, photographs, advertisements, and other forms of ephemera into new embodied forms, dislocated from their original contexts and set into newly dynamic relations. Collage operates as both method and metaphor: a means of constructing images while exposing their underlying structures. Through acts of isolation, rearrangement, and juxtaposition, these artists disrupt the narratives embedded within mass-produced imagery, allowing unexpected relationships between figures, objects, and spaces to emerge. In these works, the familiar becomes untethered and fluid. A hand, a landscape, a pattern, a face — each fragment carries traces of its previous life yet acquires new meaning through proximity to others. Compositions emerge through accumulation and editing: a careful negotiation between what is gathered and what is withheld. The exhibition's title gestures beyond the mechanics of collage toward the ways identity itself is formed. Like these images, our sense of self develops as a composite structure, shaped over time through layers of memory, influence, environment, and encounter. Experiences adhere like fragments: some seamlessly integrated, others leaving visible edges. Composite World proposes that both images and identities are assembled rather than fixed, continually revised through the fragments we choose to carry forward and those we allow to fall away.