Stephanie Summers calls on numerous disciplines to make her dazzling collages
In an unassuming strip mall in Overland Park, next to a Chipotle, you’ll find eight recent collages by artist Stephanie Summers, each a separate testament to her strong compositional instincts — and her restless eye.
Summers has produced cut-paper collages for about a decade, she tells me when I meet her at her home and temporary studio in the River Market to talk about the pieces now showing at Art Source & Design Framing Gallery. Scraps of dollar-bill-sized paper are visible throughout the space, and piles of work cover most surfaces in the apartment. This pile is for found materials, she explains, that one for a new color palette awaiting development. These are her building blocks, all of them possible ideas or jumping-off points as she works and reworks her art.
Under some paper scraps, I find an open page in an old science textbook for children. She tells me, “I don’t know yet what my commentary is on these old relics” — this book and others like it that she has collected. “I like changing stuff that might be ugly or was forgotten from previous decades.” She shows me a page printed with images and step-by-step instructions that, out of context, take on a nonsensical quality; pictured are a salamander, a beaker, and some conspicuous white powder. I imagine the page cut into leafy swirls, retaining the nostalgic colors but losing the bulk of the original images. “I think of all the pieces of paper as a puzzle,” she says. “I feel like I’m exploring the marriage of these colors with the organic shapes that I feel compelled to draw.”
Paging through her stack of found books is equal parts work and pleasure, a balance Summers learned to strike as she left behind the formal rigidity of her student days at the San Francisco Art Institute. For all the painstaking labor that’s evident in her entwined compositions, she values play in the studio — something that’s also visible in her art. The works on display right now are lively and entertaining, though they also are governed by her deeply embedded design principles.
The blue-and-magenta “Folk Billows” combines collaged paper with oil pen and colored pencil, the paper design in attractive symmetry, overlaid atop blue, bean-shaped pools. A closer look at the scalloped design calls to mind the azure skies and grassy greens of a newspaper’s travel section, reduced by Summers to connective vines of color instead of the idyllic original scene. (The longer I looked, the more I saw a pair of lungs broken down into the most essential elements: tangled blood vessels protecting sacs of air, the plum and indigo of the palette evoking oxygenation.)
“Golden Ingress” scans as a macro version of a virus growing in a petri dish. Clusters of teardrops and pods sprout from stems over a pancreatic-yellow wash in the background. A thin braid of blue and green interlocks the pieces of the strain down the middle. Words, like clues in a riddle, disappear from the surface, cut away by Summers’ scalpel. Her strengths clearly lie in the eye-catching movement of the designs and her ability to use a range of colors without distracting from the busy form.
Summers is something of a collage herself, an amalgam of designer, printmaker, painter, paper scavenger and freehand drawer. Her style translates across mediums and surfaces, an ivy growth capable of penetrating the digital sphere or overtaking a ceramic cup. Her skills translate well to commercial commissions and website building as well as to her fine-art practice; in each case, she’s rooted in a methodical approach that’s the antithesis of whatever ADD impulses her studio stacks first suggest. When Summers decides to focus on one element of design, she works painstakingly on that single aspect until she achieves the desired result. If it’s color, she cuts and builds forms that stay within her chosen range of the rainbow. If she’s focusing on a pattern, that pattern will repeat itself until the sketches resemble something you might find carved on an asylum wall.
Her process is slow, but when the final pieces come together — as they do at Art Source — the reward is clear.•
