Chiaroscuro w/ AUGUST KLINTBERG

Chiaroscuro continues themes established in my collage series Lookbook. Both of these bodies of work deploy printed matter I encountered growing up in small town Alberta (Stony Plain) in the 1980s and 90s: skateboarding magazines, gardening guides, my mother’s home decorating magazines, and the Sears Catalogue, among many others. Collaged together, the images represent my current, midlife recollections of what I remember thinking, as a teenager, that “the good life” might involve for a queer person living in this province – specifically by reconfiguring found photographic images of flowers. The work projects backward in history to my teenaged self, but also involves the present, showing my unreliable imaginings of what teen-August might have thought about my current life. The series asks: “what are the trappings necessary for a safe, sustainable, enjoyable life?” Naturally, commodities and images of luxury goods (but also quotidian stuff like filing cabinets, soap, tube socks, men’s underwear) make their way into this “lookbook” or dream catalogue I have constructed over several years. This presentation, Chiaroscuro, focuses on flowers, and is an homage to my mother’s indefatigable patience in teaching me the names, identifying features, and care for many flowers. The title for the series refers to strong contrast between light and dark areas in paintings, an effect sometimes used in still life representations of flowers. In this series, chiaroscuro is exaggerated through reproduction techniques. The title also signals how each collage throws into stark relief the contrast between my current view of my adolescent self, and my actual worldview between ages twelve and sixteen.

Bouquet w/ AUGUST KLINTBERG

Bouquet is a series of industrially fabricated neons based on a number of quickly completed drawings I made in 2025 and 2026. Each sketch was an attempt to represent a flower, simply from memory and without referring to a photograph, image, or bloom. The results – particularly when translated into neon – are fragmentary, hallucinatory, and incomplete. Each neon has two layers of tubing, creating a cascading effect. I see them as a continuation of the still life genre, through a form of utilitarian signage. Presented in a format recalling a commercial sign for a strip mall or business, the signs merely announce or promote themselves and the blossoms they represent: a vague, spiralling image of a half-recalled flower. Bouquet also makes monumental a very small drawing of a very small flower, suggesting that these fragile blooms and my fragile recollections are deserving of a long-lasting representation.

AUGUST KLINTBERG and SONDRA MESZAROS

in dialogue
2026

A FOUND IMAGE TURNED INTO A COUNTERIMAGE

“I try to make it slippery,” says Sondra.

“I try to keep it ambiguous,” says August.

Through Sondra’s collage works, found images aggregate depictions of women through various lens’ to create a hyperstition, to consider what images tell us, and what they potentially hold back. This new work prompts many questions: how do we understand female identities, desire, humour, anxiety, and alienation, through mediated images? How can images impolitely sit together? How can collage be an action of perversing materiality?

August’s collage works categorize images in relationship to create frottage – a friction. The images are all from the visual culture he encountered as a young teen growing up in small-town Alberta, and when combined they represent his past understanding of what “the good life” could be for him as a young, nascently queer person – including recombined blow-ups of floral photographs.

AGITATION AND FRICTION

“I’m always trying to agitate images,” says Sondra. “It seems to be the gauge for how I know when it’s done.” For example, “The disruption has to have an edge to it or it’s just pretty images put together. I literally fell out of love with making art. The only way I could find my way back to it was by getting in touch with my teenage self, and enjoying the fanatical labour-based drawing.”

We both are reconnecting with the practices of teenager-dom, referencing secret teenaged behavior in bedrooms. The cloister of the bedroom was a place to experiment with our early art practices. We both started collaging when we were teens. “It was an exciting prospect – a way to collect things I was already interested in: ephemera, printed matter,” says Sondra.

PATINA

August’s neons turn a quick, informal sketch into an iconic sign – a beacon for a non-existent shop, advertising a half-remembered image of a specific flower. They are pristinely fabricated industrial objects that are based on fragile, swiftly rendered drawings. The drawings are full of gestural frenzy that is smoothed out in the fabrication process. He says, “Looking closely at the neons, a kind of patina effect comes out; every tube contains a moving gas, so the colours subtly shift, and from close-up it looks like wear and tear on the colouration of the line.” In his collages he is “using [images that] have creases and folds, but then when they are translated onto the kozo paper, the surface becomes densely velvet black and those marks of wear flatten. This is important because the print ephemera I’m working with is printed on high acid, very thin glossy paper and has an extremely limited lifespan, but it’s transferring the image to archival, acid-free paper.” So, although the work isn’t monumental in scale, it’s giving serious attention to material that is usually just thrown away.

Sondra’s pencil crayon drawings take cues from a collection of 1930’s-1940’s ‘flirt-pins; obsessively collected over 7 years. The original hand-made pins were used as a short-hand for communicating to signal through wearing. The pinbacks were re-purposed from leftover political pins used for campaigns. The graphic design of these pins shares a lot with punk pins and zines from the 1970’s-1990’s. By blowing up the pins to grungy cool jumbo versions they become hyper signifiers for identity. Sondra says: “It’s important that the rust is on the buttons; they were chosen based on their wear and tear. There is some sort of history, or a past love of wearing it. The rust becomes active evidence of disrupting the text. It was one of my favourite parts to draw. To me, the cast shadows are really a pantina too. I kept calling them dirty little cast shadows because they reflect the colour of the rust on the back of the buttons.”

CODED MESSAGES

Sondra says, “I am continually engaging signs and symbols that keep popping up in the work to create a moshing of images. There are a few things in this show that I am repeating: clothing as adornment, like the bra moustaches, fetish fashion to perform femininity through the trench coats and leopard prints, and dishevelled femme fatales that are disobedient by being silly. I’m using a particular humour in the pins and collages that is very much linked to being GenX. There is a wanting to resist being sexual by being funny back – “you like it like this” waka-waka. There is agency in that. It’s hot to oscillate between desire and humour. I try to use codes to wink a bit.”

August says, “With my collages, the image combinations are often faintly ridiculous – a pair of polka dot bikini briefs next to a cut crystal punch bowl and a cluster of roses. Like, what? Obviously, something about societal expectations about femininity and queerness going together – yet there are other encoded meanings layered underneath that first read. Because what these images have in common is not just about a femme queer kid liking flowers, underwear, and expensive things, but also being highly attracted to all forms of ornament. Ornament as a deflection tactic I used in my earliest queer days. Ornament as camouflage.”

Sondra replies, “The humour I used in the drawings and collages is straddling a place of punk-femme with Catherine O’Hara, Gilda Radner, SCTV and that it’s really specific female comedy. That is always a lens for me; thinking about how to use sweet and saucy in a way that can redress coded images. I enjoy the notion that women can be performing certain things through a sarcastic lens that is all-knowing and not concerned with being put in a box. That they are actively in pursuit of being self-actualized through a resistance over and over again.” In the collage ‘High Pony for Charlie’ there is this nod to how it feels to wear a boyfriend’s tee shirt and alter it to be more femme. In this case it is a ruthlessly cropped Charlie Brown tee shirt that barely conceals a nip slip. Mixed with the gesture of re-positioning a high ponytail as being a feminine tweak that can be interpreted as sexually charged.

ADVERTISING AND ALLURE

Some of the found images we both work with come from the realm of advertising. These are, generally, crafted images designed to spark desire in the viewer. When deployed in our work, the format of desire changes; for example, August is employing images from the Sears Catalogue – publications designed to reiterate signals of heteronormativity and gender binary norms and ideas of adulthood and childhood (what children wear, what do adult women wear, what do adult men wear, what are appropriate bedsheets for a teenaged boy versus a 12 year old boy, etc.). His collage series fuses together images from different sections of the catalogue alongside fragments from his mother’s home decorating magazines, skateboard magazines borrowed from his adolescent friends, and images from a clothing catalogue marketed to men that have sex with men, from the 1990s.

Sondra is using fashion and vintage fetish magazines to create a pivot around the idea of the femme fatale, mixed with women misbehaving, and specific female archetypes like “The Blonde.” Combining these images there is a resist that happens where the images start to have a heated exchange through the print quality of the black and white fetish images, and the hyper saturated colours of the fashion images. This can be seen in ‘Blonde Baggage’ a collage where a blonde with a high ponytail is hiding within an extremely oversized trenchcoat carrying various shopping bags. The size of the trench coat is eclipsing the blonde and making her seem like a larger-than-life body. Using the images to speak to stereotypes but also tear them down through the act of being playful; subverting things that are weaponized against women.