Tanya Hollis’ work in collage is so delicate—so moving and so witty—you almost have to see it in person; so Kevin Killian wrote a sequence of poems to try to fill in the gaps in your apprehension of this inimitable work. If collage has traditionally proceeded through addition and subtraction, Hollis has brought multiplication and division into the mix, a higher algebra to soothe the western shores on which she and her projects now find themselves clinging. Killian’s poems, on the woody subjects he knows best, take off from a different Hollis image each time, and try to leap from shingle to shingle as the house burns down beneath him at the end of the sequence. It just so happens that the artist for whom this on-line gallery is named, was herself an escape artist, and might have enjoyed Hollis’ and Killian’s tributes to her esprit d’escalier.
The Woods by Kevin Killian and Tanya Hollis, online now through April 30 at Marjorie Wood Gallery.