COLLAGE::BOOKS is a multi-day event about collage, community, & publishing that takes place in Montreal, 2-5 October 2025.

ABOUT THE EVENT

ABOUT VOLUME 8 MTL

COLLAGE::BOOKS is part of VOLUME 8 MTL, Montreal’s annual conference and fair devoted to art publishing and artists’ books. Events run parallel to the festival which includes workshops, panels, and a book fair. VOLUME 8 MTL is produced by ARCMTL, a Montreal-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and preserving local independent culture. VOLUME 8 MTL presents works and programming in both English and French, including artists and publishers from all over Canada, the US and elsewhere.

WHERE TO STAY

Participants in COLLAGE::BOOKS and Volume 8 MTL will need to find their own accommodations. There is no host hotel. Montreal has a large number of full-service and boutique hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and vacation rentals. Activities for COLLAGE::BOOKS will be centered Downtown, near Place des Arts, and in Little Italy (near the Jean-Talon Metro station on the Orange and Blue Lines). Tourisme Montréal offers an online booking service. 

PUBLICATION

The Book as a Place of Collage

The companion to the 2019 edition of COLLAGE::BOOKS, The Book as a Place of Collage considers as a point of departure that the book, not the gallery, is the best place to experience collage. In this book, Kolaj Magazine Editor Ric Kasini Kadour investigates this idea using examples from the magazine’s collection of collage books and work by presenters at the symposium, Kadour traces the history of collage publishing, offers a taxonomy of various publishing activities, and discusses the function of the book in art practice, for art professionals, for viewer or collector. The book includes a statement identifying strategies for supporting the book as a means of distribution and (like exhibition) as a viable and respected part of an artist’s practice. Chapters include: The Exhibition Book as Travel; Sketchbook as Zine; Book as Extension of Practice; Collage as Illustration in Books; The Book as Calling Card; Book as Curatorial Project; Book as Sculpture; Process, Concept, & Material; Narrative & Object; Book as a Method of Distribution; and Collage Comic Books.

A copy of The Book as a Place of Collage is included in the registration for COLLAGE::BOOKS. 

PROGRAM & EVENTS 

MAKING

Collage Making with Jerome Bertrand

7PM, Thursday, 2 October 2025
Location: Jerome Bertrand Studio, 5155 rue d’Iberville, Suite 585

After our rendezvous at Bar Chez Tzina, we will head over to the studio of Montreal collage artist and photographer Jerome Bertrand for an evening of collage making.

Image: Triumphs by Jérôme Bertrand. Courtesy of the artist.

NETWORKING

Morning Coffee Meet & Greet

9AM, Friday, 3 October 2025
Location: Cafe SAT, 6 Place du Marché ( entrance is around the corner from SAT, 1201 St-Laurent)

Friday morning we will rendezvous at Cafe SAT in Downtown Montreal for an informal social gathering before heading to Artexte which is a short walk (less than a block) from the cafe. “Located next to Parc de la Paix, Café SAT is at the gateway to Chinatown and the Quartier des spectacles. Its charm lies in its friendly ambience and bright, stimulating atmosphere…We offer a selection of third-wave coffees in addition to a selection of in-house teas, prepared with care by our baristas. We also make our own unique creations, so come and try our homemade café-limo or our hazelnut affogato ice cream! We serve a menu of classic viennoiseries and decadent pastries.” WEBSITE

SITE VISIT

Artexte

10AM, Friday, 3 October 2025
Location: 2 St Catherine St East, Suite 301, Montreal, Quebec H2X 1K4

“Artexte is a library, research centre and exhibition space for contemporary art. Our unique print and digital document collection holds over 30,000 documents covering the visual arts from 1965 to the present, with an emphasis on the art of Canada and Québec.” They work to “conserve documentation on art for research on site and online; support research in our collection; present exhibitions, new works and public programmes; and publish art historical texts, anthologies and artists’ books.” At Artexte, we will explore how this unique organization supports the culture and history of art publishing. We will look at examples of collage books and talk about how artists document their practice. Some highlights will include R. F. Côté’s mail art project, Circulaire 132; a selection of historic collage exhibition catalogs, including “The Collage Show” (1971, Vancouver); and files on collage artists in the collection. Léa Boisvert-Chénier, Collections Librarian, and Jonathan Lachance, Documentation Technician, will guide us through the collection. We will look at a collection of historic books about collage and consider their role in the world and how they hold art history, as well as a collection of publications that explore xerography or copy-art. WEBSITE

Jerome Bertrand

Montreal, Quebec

Originally from Gatineau, Montreal collagist and photographer Jérôme Bertrand studied at Dawson College. His collage work was featured in the Kolaj Institute publication, The Tissue Box Book by Québec Collage (2021) and Collage Artist Trading Cards, Pack 8. In 2019-2020, his temporary collage installation, Heat Wave, was installed on the York Street Stairs in downtown Ottawa, and featured in Kolaj 26. In 2021, his collage installation, Hommage à Riopelle, 2e mouvement, was placed on the side of a building at 59 Wellington Street in downtown Gatineau. In 2024, the City of Gatineau commissioned the artist for a large collage installation in the Aylmer district, Renaître de ses cendres (Rebirth from the Ashes). Bertrand’s self-published collage volume, East of a 100th, appeared in 2023. The artist lives and works in Montreal’s Rosemont-Petite Patrie neighbourhood.

Image: cover of East of a 100th by Jérôme Bertrand. Courtesy of the artist.

SYMPOSIUM

The Book as a Place of Collage

12-5PM, Friday, 3 October 2025
Location: Casa d’Italia, 505 Jean-Talon East, Montreal

The symposium, The Book as a Place of Collage, invites artists, gallerists, writers, poets, publishers, academic researchers to join a conversation around the role publishing plays in collage artist’s practice. The day begins with a brief session in which we frame the conversation about collage and the book. Ric Kasini Kadour will present an overview of the various types of books collage artists make and speak about the work that has led up to the symposium. The day will unfold in four panels: In “The Collage Book as a Place of Survival, Liberation, & Making Sense of Things”, we will hear from presenters whose work stands as an argument for a reimagining of how we think about books and the collage in them. The projects presented in “Collage as Art Movement” reflect how the International Collage Community comes together, makes art, and uses publishing to diffuse that art into the larger culture. The presenters in “Book Publishing as Artist Practice” will show projects where the book is the centrepoint of the contemporary art project, rather than an auxiliary element. “Book Making as Artist Practice” will focus on artists who approach the collage book as the site of artist practice. In the final session, we identify strategies for supporting the book as a means of cultural diffusion. The final session will be structured in a way that articulates general strategies and recommendations to artists, galleries, art centres, museums, libraries, and booksellers.

Image: Landlines by Clive Knights
8″x190″; (handmade accordion-style book) paper collage and graphite on Indian handmade paper; 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

BOOK FAIR

Volume 8 MTL

Noon-6PM Saturday, 4 October 2025 & Sunday, 5 October 2025
Location: Casa d’Italia, 505 Jean-Talon East, Montreal

“Providing a gathering space for English and French artists based in Montreal, North America, and internationally, Volume MTL encourages and supports the arts publishing sector from many angles. At a time where art publishing and innovative and artisanal artists’ book production is exploding around the world, Volume MTL fosters the development of the sector locally and nationally by generating communication between audiences, publishers, and artists. The doors of Casa d’Italia, located directly across from Jean-Talon Metro Station, will open from noon to 6 PM to bring together over fifty artists, writers, and publishers of art books and magazines from across Canada and beyond.” On both days of the fair, fairgoers will have the opportunity to attend discussions and presentations in both French and English on a variety of topics from artists, writers, and publishers.

At the fair, registered participants of Collage::Books are invited to display and sell books at the fair on Saturday and Sunday as part of Kolaj Institute’s booth. Kolaj Institute will be staffing the table, so registered participants may take part in the programming. Instructions will be sent with the confirmation of registration. Those with questions are encouraged to email.

In addition to current and back issues of Kolaj Magazine, Kolaj Institute will be showing a number of its publishing projects including Folklore of the Upper Nithsdale, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Artists in the Archives, Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream, Standard Practices in Dressmaking, Magic in the Modern World, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and  Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide. In addition to books, Kolaj Institute’s print folios for Frankenstein: 21st Century, Art to Resist & Survive Authoritarianism, and Artists in the Archives will be available to view.

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

CONVENOR

Ric Kasini Kadour

Ric Kasini Kadour is a writer, artist, publisher, and cultural worker. He is editor and publisher of Kolaj Magazine, a printed, internationally-focused magazine about contemporary, fine art collage. He has written for a number of galleries and his writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Vermont Magazine, Seven Days, Seattle Weekly, Art New England (where he was the former Vermont editor) and many others. Kadour is the author of several ‘zines, including Art Is Food (2006), How to Price Your Artwork (2005), Everything That Is Wrong With You & How To Fix It (2015), I Am Calling Today… (2016), What Will Be of Us? (2017), Apotheosis Ruskin (2017), The Veneration of Ruskin (2017), My Pet Rock: A Tragedy & Love Story (2018), Kunstkammer Field Report: Rutland (2019), Eight Sonnets (2019), What Good Is a Photograph? (2020), America’s Promise (2021), and I Took a Trip to the Unknown Language (2023). He is also the author of several texts related to his curation work, including, Where the Sun Casts No Shadow: Postcards fom the Creative Crossroads of Quito, Ecuador (2019), Rokeby Through the Lens (2019), Contemporary American Regionalism: Vermont Perspectives (2019), Mending Fences: The Culture of Repair in Art & History (2020), The Money Show: Cash, Labor, Capitalism, & Collage (2021), Artists in the Archives (2022), Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream (2022), and Magic in the Modern World (2024). He also wrote the introductory text for Martin Mycielski’s Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide (2025). Kadour maintains an active art practice and his photography, collage, and sculpture have been exhibited throughout North America and is in private collections in Australia, Europe and North America. He has produced exhibitions as a gallerist and curator in Albuquerque, Milwaukee, Montreal, New Orleans, and throughout Vermont. His community organizing efforts have resulted in a number of large scale art events in North America and beyond. Kadour holds a BA in Comparative Religion from the University of Vermont and was the recipient of a 2020-2021 Curatorial Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Kadour splits his time between Montreal and New Orleans. Learn more at www.rickasinikadour.com.

The Collage Book as a Place of Survival, Liberation, & Making Sense of Things

Historically, the book contained a linear, rational, narrative-based argument that allowed its author to share knowledge in such a way that explained the world for the reader. In an increasingly technologically advanced and globalized world, those linear, rational, narratives, are, sometimes, inadequate to explain what is nonlinear and irrational. Early Modern writers experimented with disjunction, juxtaposition, and unreliable narrators. They collaged styles and modalities foreseeing a world in which multiple literacies were needed to comprehend. Collage, which offers a path to make sense of fragmentation and complexity visually without the encumbrance of language, was a natural companion to these textual experiments. Yet, the difficulty and expense of making illustrated books has largely kept written and visual languages apart. When they did interact, often art was seen as an illustration of the written word and not an augmentation of it. In this session, we will hear from a number of presenters whose work stands as an argument for a reimagining of how we think about books and the collage in them.

Lynne Huffer

Stone Mountain, Georgia

Lynne Huffer is a queer, feminist, environmental philosopher and poet-writer-collagist who is “driven by a desire to think-feel the world differently than before, and to open up new spaces for intimacy, friendship, and political solidarities.” Her book, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction (Duke University Press, 2025), “brings together philosophy, memoir, poetry, and original multimedia artworks to articulate an ethics of living on a devastated planet.” She will speak about how collage can be used for philosophical expression and how she uses collage and décollage “as part of a way to think about fragments, fragmentation, and how to survive in an increasingly fragmented world.” Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and the author of six books and numerous articles.

Image: illustration on page 50 of These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction by Lynne Huffer. Courtesy of the artist.

Lynn Butler-Kisber

Montreal, Quebec

Lynn Butler-Kisber has been on the forefront of arts-based research since the beginning, having attended the two conferences Elliot Eisner organized at Stanford University in the 1990s where the term was coined. For Sage Research Methods, she wrote, “Collages created in research by either participants or researchers, or both, are often constructed using popular magazines because of the availability of these sources and the limited skills that are required in cutting and sticking. Collages can be used to reflect on the research process as ‘visual reflective memos,’ or as an elicitation process used with participants to help them share their thoughts and experiences, as a way of conceptualizing understanding in the research process that might otherwise remain ‘hidden’ or implicit, or as a representational form (Butler-Kisber, 2010; in press). These ways of using collage are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive, but they are a means of ‘fighting familiarity’ and the linearity in written texts, and exploring ideas metaphorically to provide new and nuanced perspectives about experiences and phenomena (Mannay, 2010).” Butler-Kisber is Professor of Integrated Studies in the Faculty of Education and an Associate Member in the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. Her upcoming book with Gail Prasad, Handbook of arts-based research, will be published by Routledge.

Terriann Walling

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Knights recently collaborated on a book of poetry and collage with Canadian poet Terriann Walling. Labyrinth of Wind (self-published, 2024) is a 120-page full-colour book in which 52 original poems are paired with an equal number of collages. “Each pairing builds upon a magical world, a mythical labyrinth inhabited by strange, poetic figures that reflect the fragmented beauty and complexity of human nature. Our process was fully reciprocal. Sometimes I would write a poem that Clive would visually interpret, and other times his collages inspired the poems.” Walling will speak about their process which she described “not only as image-making but as a living conversation between word and visual fragment.” She wrote, “publishing this book became an extension of our artistic practice, especially working across continents via Zoom. We will discuss the challenges and rewards of sustaining a multidisciplinary, long-distance collaboration and how the physical book serves as a vital object that holds our poetic and visual dialogue together.”

Image: cover of Labyrinth of Wind: Poems and Collages by Terriann Walling and Clive Knights. Courtesy of the artist.

Collage as Art Movement

Kolaj Institute has long maintained that collage is a community that operates like an Art Movement. From large-scale, collaborative efforts by internationally networked groups of artists to individual or small group efforts centered around projects, collage artists often operate without regard for art institutions and markets, creating their own ecosystems for cultural exchange and engagement. They create communities. They make artwork. They publish books and organize exhibitions. Like the medium itself, the movement is often misunderstood by an art world that emphasizes individual authorship, market value, and the mythology of the solitary artist. To consider this International Collage Community–and the thousands of artists engaged in it–as an Art Movement raises questions about the art world’s branding and gatekeeping of what an Art Movement is. In this session, we will hear from a number of presenters about how the International Collage Community comes together, makes art, and uses publishing to diffuse that art into the larger culture. Each of the projects presented in this session, runs counter to the myth of the solitary artist and demonstrates how it takes a community to publish books and connect them with an audience.

Maria Schamis Turner

Montreal, Quebec

Collage artist Maria Schamis Turner uses shape and color to play with and question visual conventions of human and animal forms, often venturing into the absurd. Turner’s “Nonsensical Beasts” combine fragments from fashion and design magazines with animal and human appendages. Her project to create an unconventional fashion line led her to develop Frédéric Le ShoeShoe, a fictional fashion designer from Montreal who travels to New Orleans in search of glory. While Artist-in-Residence at Kolaj Institute in May 2024, she absorbed the atmosphere of New Orleans and delved into the Institute’s material library. When she returned to Montreal, she completed the collage series and the accompanying narrative. She published The Life & Design of Frédéric Le ShoeShoe (self-published, 2025) the following March. Turner will speak about her experience developing the project and finding an audience for her book. She is currently working on another book project based on dinosaurs.

Image: cover of The Life & Design of Frédéric Le ShoeShoe by Maria Schamis-Turner. Courtesy of the artist.

Paul Loughney

Brooklyn, New York

Paul Loughney will present the recently published book, Transformation: A Survey of Collage and the Development of Personal Language (Aqualamb, 2025), for which he wrote the introduction. The book is a project of Aqualamb, a Brooklyn-based record label and publisher who has made a niche for themselves publishing books of artwork alongside their vinyl and CD releases in what they describe as “the age of invisible music.” Transformation, is strictly an artbook that features thirteen contemporary collage artists. Loughney will speak about his experience developing and promoting the book. Loughney holds an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and his certificate in Printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His work has appeared in solo and group shows across the US and in Germany and Mexico.

Image: Vestigial Spirit by Paul Loughney
12″x9″x.875″; collage mounted on panel; 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Evan Nicholls

Portland, Oregon

Since 1990, Portland, Oregon-based Future Tense “has gone from scrappy xeroxed chapbooks to beautifully designed paperbacks, limited edition hardcovers, and eBooks.” Under the editorial direction of Kevin Sampsell, they have published “new and groundbreaking writers and books that take chances and go places where you might not expect,” They wrote, “We’re committed to showcasing writers who are not just important and innovative, but also accessible and fun. We’re in this to create real art. We’re in this for the long haul.” About their most recent title, they wrote, “A dog in a dunce cap. The world’s longest sausage. A giraffe crippled by blocks of color… Clad in uncanny poems and minimalist collages, Evan Nicholls’ Easy Tiger is on a multimedia quest to reorganize the mundane. Fascinated with turns of phrase and the absurd, Easy Tiger is about love, doubt, and taking scissors to the everyday.” Evan Nicholls is a poet and collage artist from Virginia. His most recent book, Easy Tiger (Future Tense, 2025), “is a surreal-absurd collection of minimal collage and short-form poetry and prose poetry.” He wrote, “Many of the poems also take turns of phrase/sayings (or versions of sayings, with a letter changed, a word twisted) as titles. In this way, the poetry in Easy Tiger is in close communication with collage work, letting found material, i.e. found word(s) lead the creation and presentation of the poem(s).” Nicholls will present selected works from Easy Tiger and speak and his process of making collage for the book.

Image: An Armed Man by Evan Nicholls
paper; 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Book Publishing as Artist Practice

In the art world, the book is often seen as auxiliary to artist practice. Galleries and museums publish catalogs as companions to exhibitions which are given primacy over the publication. What happens when this dynamic is inverted? What happens when art is made for the page rather than the wall? This subject is particularly relevant to those artists and writers working at the intersection of Poetry & Collage, which literary publications may view as too art based and art publications view as too text based. But through this cross-disciplinary, multi-medium approach artists are forging new experiences of culture. The presenters in this session will show projects where the book is the centrepoint of the contemporary art project, rather than an auxiliary element and speak about the role publishing plays in their practice, process, and making and the role publishing plays in the diffusion of their artwork.

S. Erin Batiste

Brooklyn, New York

“I do Black women’s work. My poetry and collage center the lives and experiences of Black women and girls, my matrilineage and ancestors,” wrote S. Erin Batiste. Her practice is rooted in accumulation and maximalism, and she is influenced by beauty, otherworlds, waymaking and migration, divination and astrology, Americana, archives, and what remains. Her work examines themes of freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories. Providence (self-published, 2024) and The Glory Will Be Revealed (University of New Orleans Press, forthcoming, 2026) “are made of mixed-media collages and prayer spells reclaimed from the New Orleans Public Library archive” that draw on early 20th century mugshot photos of Black women and girls. The book itself is a performative intervention. Batiste wrote, “The women and girls were born just one generation out of slavery and the Civil War. Connecting them with images from space and the desert, animals, geodes, food, floriography and spiritual technology—these women are offered safe passage to other worlds and possibilities where they may receive care, beauty and dignity beyond what they ever imagined, what was made available to them here. Both books are an act of witness, memorial, reconciliation, and repair.” Batiste is a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature and a 2025 Powerhouse Artist Subsidy Program Recipient working with the PHA Printshop. Batiste runs Revival Archival Cards, Collage & Salvage—a mobile arts studio in Brooklyn.

Image: pages 10 and 11 of Providence by S. Erin Batiste
7″x5″; 16 pages; revival archival cards, collage and salvage, paper, kraft board, salvage decorative paper, grocery bags, archival matte prints, sticker, binder clip or staple (depending on version); 2024 (editions 1 and 2) and 2025 (editions 3 and 4). Courtesy of the artist.

Helena Sieborgs

Leopoldsburg, Belgium & Saint-Thégonnec Loc-Eguiner, France

The artist practice of Helena Sieborgs bridges photography, collage, and ecology. In her project, The Tender Veil (self-published, forthcoming 2025), Sieborgs intervenes on the 20th-century crime scene photographs of French police photographer Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) with floral interventions as a way to consider “ethics in representation, the aesthetics of violence, and the power of collage to act as both critique and commemoration.” She wrote, “Through collage, I intervene on these stark documents of violence. I overlay the depicted corpses with cut-outs of flowers and flora in colour. This gesture transforms the photographs into layered visual memorials. The flowers conceal, but also reveal: they redirect the gaze from the gruesome evidence toward a more tender meditation on mortality, memory, and the dignity of the anonymous subjects…The project situates itself at the intersection of archival research, collage practice, and artist publishing. It proposes the book as both container and stage for collage, where memory, history, and image can coexist in layered, fragile forms.”

Image: collage from The Tender Veil (artist book) by Helena Sieborgs
11.7″x8.3″; collage on archival reproductions (public domain images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art) with botanical imagery; 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Gia Anansi Shakur

New York, New York

Gia Anansi Shakur’s ekphrastic poetry and collage project, Bella Daa’kness: From Montauk to Beyond, is a collection of one hundred collages that explores lineage, current events and spirituality. The collages are accompanied by “longhands” or the word impression first given after completion. “Scale and juxtaposition are two techniques I play with in collage art to express the dynamics of contrast and connection—how disparate elements can clash, coexist, or harmonize within a shared visual space…This daily practice has become both resistance and ritual—each collage a site of inquiry, healing and imaginative possibility. Working across mediums and histories, I layer texture, rememory and mythology to reimagine what it means to hold space in a world of turbulence and reinvention. These works speak to ancestral grievances, diasporic longing, and the fragmented yet fertile ground where future, past, and present selves converge in visionary, often subversive, acts of becoming.” Anansi Shakur is co-founder of Revival of the Seers (sponsored by Saltwater Sojourn), a program that seeks to financially and spiritually nurture culture workers in the Southern United States; an editorial associate at Fiction; and currently pursuing an MFA at the City College of New York.

Image: collage from Bella Daa’kness : From Montauk to Beyond by Gia Anansi Shakur. Courtesy of the artist.

Book Making as Artist Practice

Publishing, by its nature, is an outward facing practice of diffusing (culture) image and text through the act of printing and distribution. Publishing is in conversation with, but not entirely inclusive of book making, which is the process an artist or writer uses to make images and texts. Some artists make books to be published. Other artists simply make books which become unique objects. In Artists Books: A Critical Survey of The Literature, Stefan Klima traces the public debate around Artist Books that kicked off when the term was coined in 1973. “Three issues dominated the debate: definition; the book considered an object and its challenge to a new kind of reading—the debate’s implicit political act; and, the desire to challenge an art establishment—the debate’s explicit political act. Of the three, the work to establish an acceptable definition consumed the greatest effort. If it is deemed necessary, it has yet to be established.” Writing in 1998, Klima concludes, “Artists books are moving in two directions as we head to the end of the 20th century: the crafted object, and the artwork, both limited edition, and unique object. The relationship between the two has never been eradicated; attempts at dismissing the craft sensibility was the goal of a number of writers. And yet, the traditions of the craft influenced the traditions of the non-craft, even during repudiation of the former.” As we head deeper into the 21st Century, notions of Artist Books continue to be muddled. In her introduction to Artists Who Make Books (Phaidon, 2017), Claire Lehmann anchors artists’ books in the tradition of Conceptual Art and extols their value as a democratic and popular way to share art: at low cost to the consumer and “without the mediation of exhibition space.” And yet, Artists Books are often high valued objects, collected and exhibited by institutions. In A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950–1975 (Brill, 2016), Thomas Hvid Kromann describes artist books as a “genuine cross-aesthetic artefact and it served as a vehicle for artistic ideas and concepts.” In this session, we will hear from artists who use the collage book as a site of Artist Practice.

Tim Abel

Champaign, Illinois

“I turn to bookmaking as a way to create living archives of experiences as well as a way to share with and invite others to be with the book. In my practice, I make books that range from Xerox Zines to unique accordion and complex pamphlet stitch books to assisting with large collective formally self-published book projects.” Tim Abel is “interested in how collage, when understood as an accumulative and expansive concept, in relation to artists books helps to shape our understanding of invitation and becomes a way to welcome new ways of thinking about making, being with and collaborating.” Abel views collage in light of American cartoonist Lynda Barry’s creative affirmation “+ + +” which for them is expressed as “artist books + collage + collaboration + accumulation.” Abel will present on a collection of artists books and art books that intentionally work through collage: French artist Alexis Petroff’s Tape Collages (1990); Mexico City Artist Alfonso Santiago’s Un libro biblioteca (2020); Process Deck (2018) by New Orleans’s The Black School; and Abel’s own “collaboratively constructed, enacted and added-to sculptural accordion book” made with Ishita Dharap, samantha shoppell, Natalia Espinel, and Rachel Gu (2023/2024). “These book moments are expansive and deep while intentionally making room for others to be part of the worlds that they craft in their own book forms.” Abel recently defended their dissertation, Look For Pattern: Collage As Co-Created Pedagogical Space and has a PhD in art education from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They hold a MFA, with a focus in printmaking and installation, from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a MA in art therapy from New York University.

image: foldable practices (artist book) constructed and invitation by: Ishita Dharap, samantha shoppell, Natalia Espinel, Rachel Gu, Tim Abel
7″x5″x4″ (closed), 7″x5″x120″ (open); mat board, machine stitching, marker, pencil, cutting, participation. Courtesy of the artists.

Éric Simon

Hudson, Quebec

Éric Simon has dedicated himself to the creation of objects, images, and texts for nearly forty years. Between 1993 and 2003, he mounted a series of hit-and-run exhibitions in offbeat Montreal storefronts, offering visitors a zany potpourri of art objects that managed to balance his affection for both Art Brut and realism. He has collaborated on numerous performances, public readings, and other creative projects. Although his art revolves mainly around painting and drawing, he also publishes books of poetry and fiction. Making, publishing, and altering books have maintained a consistent presence in his practice throughout the years that includes such moments as Les Mille et une Phrases (Contre-mur édition, 2016), a love story told using 1001 found sentences; La correction (unrealized, 2006), an altered book subject to a “cease and desist” by its author; J’ai couche dans un Yi-king (self published, 2018), a collaborative book made of hand-carved rubber stamps; and Le Temps de mes parents, a 2025 exhibition at Maison de la littérature (Québec City, Québec) which shows a book deconstructed into objects and strips of paper. Simon’s locative collage and poetry collaboration with Julia Schroeder was published in PoextryXCollage Volume Six (Kolaj Institute/Maison Kasini Canada, 2024). Simon taught at John Abbott College’s Fine Arts Department for 8 years and at Concordia University’s Painting and Drawing Program for 14 years, until he retired in 2022.

Image: Les Temps des mes parents (detail) by Éric Simon
exhibition image from La maison de la littérature, Quebec City, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.