To be fair, even Kipp Normand has trouble describing the work of Kipp Normand.

For twenty years, Normand has cherry-picked his mammoth collection of 19th and 20th-century objects and ephemera—“I’ve been collecting since I was five years old,” he says—to find the building blocks of his art. In his earliest work he arranged these objects and images to create shelf displays and dioramas; in time he graduated to complex shadow boxes, assemblages, installations, collages, and Rauschenberg-style “combines.” The elements he includes are sometimes mundane, sometimes arcane, but the arrangements are always unexpected and witty—wryly suggesting new meaning through the juxtaposition, and re-presentation, of what was heretofore unconnected.

Some art critics have located Normand’s work in the tradition of “junk art”—art that reclaims and fetishizes discarded items. This isn’t entirely wrong (and Normand himself uses the term “junk artist”), but it doesn’t adequately capture what’s expressed in the work. Although some elements in Normand’s art are clearly salvaged, their “junkiness”—their identity as something damaged, or discarded, or unwanted—is almost entirely erased in the process of transformation. It’s more accurate to describe Normand’s pieces as “curations”: formally rigorous, thoughtful, even affectionate, presentations of objects and images that Normand considers worthy of our consideration. Normand sometimes refers to his pieces as “reliquaries”—containers for sacred objects—and that probably fits the case even better.

*Hymnal*
shadow box construction
5" x 7" x 4"

It’s another easy mistake to describe Kipp Normand’s work as “quaint” or “nostalgic.” Although elements of his pieces are patently antique, their antiquity feels more like a cover or a device, not its own end. For Normand, antique elements are primarily useful because they reinforce a schism (“the disconnect that comes with the passage of time,” he says), a de-familiarization, between the viewer and the piece: “The (images and elements) are back (in time) far enough that people won’t see themselves.” According to Normand, this phenomenon allows the viewer to experience the piece with more clarity, detachment, and humor.

*Little Timmy Was Not Like His Brothers*
collage on antique photograph
10" x 12"

But viewers can decide for themselves when visiting FEVER DREAM, Kipp Normand’s show of new work in the Gallery Annex at the Harrison Center. The show includes two dozen new collages and half a dozen new shadow boxes, many on the themes that collectors have come to associate with Normand’s work: Americana, the supernatural, social non-conformity, and especially religion. Like most of Normand’s previous work, the pieces are a little dark, and very funny. Much of the work is small-scale, inviting the viewer to lean in, literally: Normand often builds in information that becomes visible only as the viewer steps closer to the piece, and spends more time and attention. The collage Recipes Against Melancholy looks like a patchwork of random vintage papers from a distance; close in, the viewer will notice a bright pink thread connecting words like pin-points on a map.

*Recipes Against Melancholy*
mixed media collage
28" x 36"

In at least one important way, however, this show represents an important departure for Normand. Several pieces in the show incorporate chine collé, a process that blends aspects of printmaking and collage. In chine collé, the artist arranges ink and paper images upside-down on a surface, then passes them through a press to adhere them to the paper. Because the artist is racing the clock and can’t see the result in advance, the process is fast and unpredictable—the exact opposite of Normand’s usual practice of slow and deliberate arrangement. The result is pieces that are looser and livelier than his earlier work.

*Flawed Grant*
monotype with collage
21" x 28"

For Normand, this was a calculated move. Changing the pace of his process allowed him to create more pieces, faster—Normand has previously been known to work on one piece for weeks or months—but also to challenge himself by embracing uncertainty and error as an essential part of the process of making. This was both “exciting” and “terrifying” for Normand, forcing him to confront the surprises and predicaments that were the inevitable by-products of this new way of working—but it also allowed him to produce work that could not have come about in any other way.

*White Girls*
monotype with collage
21" x 28"

There are also hints of encoded autobiography in this work, reminiscent of Betye Saar’s storytelling shadow boxes. In the shadow box Communion, for example, Normand evokes his own Catholic upbringing with vintage images of little girls posing for First Communion. Real plant roots entwine a Victorian heart, an apparent reference to both familial “roots” and the Catholic sacred heart. But closer viewers will notice that one of the little girls is a repeated, ghosted image—a personal reference for Normand, whose family has a multi-generational history of twins, some of whom died in infancy.

*Communion*
shadow box construction
5" x 7" x 4"

FEVER DREAM is on view during the month of September in the Gallery Annex.