Kari Stewart We’ll Make Art of Fragments For her solo exhibition at the ACCEA, We’ll Make Art of Fragments, Glasgow-based American artist, Kari Stewart presents a collection of new drawing, collage and sculptural works. Working across a variety of media, Stewart’s work often explores the tensions between narrative and perception, subjective experience and mass cultural narrative. For her exhibition at the ACCEA, she presents us with a dissonant landscape of images and text which have been removed from their original historical or geographical contexts and subjected to a series of interruptions, reinterpretations, and disarticulations. Appropriating disparate source images and texts, from an online blog post on a gaming website (The Water Here, 2013) to a Youtube video-still of police searching an empty desert landscape (Police Search Juan Tabo, 2013), Stewart’s work breaks down the inherent authority and rationality of the original images and texts, and explores the potential for subjective readings to undermine mass narratives. Collectively, these works reflect a shifting, fragmented landscape, a space for reinterpretation and creation. The exhibition’s title is taken from a lecture on T.S. Eliot’s 1922 modernist post-war poem, The Waste Land, in which a scholar describes Eliot’s poem; a disjointed collage of allusion, quotation, fractured narratives and poetic fragments, as an act of defiance: “If fragments are all we have, we’ll make art of fragments”.
