Making the cut

Patti Menkes’s worldly but wise collage takes on pop culture

Part of the pleasure of looking at Patti Menkes’s collages is identifying at least some of the iconic works of art and famous faces from which she has appropriated bits and pieces. But Menkes aims to move beyond homage. Aided by her estimable taste, she assembles distinctive art that highlights how culture is made or, more accurately, remade. While many of the works Menkes excerpts are well known, their blue chip status is incidental, a by-product of the artist’s process, which involves clipping reproductions from art exhibition catalogues and decor and lifestyle publications, and combining them with her own photographs and drawings. Engaging as it is to play the name game, you don’t need an art history degree to appreciate the canny inventiveness and irreverent commentary that characterize Menkes’s works such as Judge (2016), a nod to Ruth Bader Ginsburg; or the rogues’ gallery (ranging from Andy Warhol to a Botero matador) in The Last Supper (2016). Combining high and low sources and embracing imperfection, Menkes reflects upon our fixation with beauty and glamour, as in her retro-sexy Woman in Capri (2013) or the buffed Man with Surfboard (2014).

While a lighthearted spirit predominates, her worldly pictures also embrace the dynamics of intent, ambivalence and chance. Fashioned from layers of torn paper, their method of manufacture reflects life choices–some made impulsively, others entered into with great deliberation. Her methods may even infer meaning as with the diptych Americana (2013); divided and with torn edges.

Often organized in loosely thematic series, her oeuvre includes Portraits, featuring mostly imaginary people. Rooted in her early experiences in New York studying fashion photography and working on photo shoots, the portraits are testimonies to the expressive possibilities of styling. For the artist, the eyes and gaze of a figure are central. “I read someone by looking into their eyes,” says Menkes, “and a gaze tells so much, especially the extent to which that person is really present.” That said, the eyes in many of her portraits are subversively hidden by a hat, sunglasses, goggles or lowered eyelids. Particularly haunting are the empty eyes in BD Eyes (2012), in which balconies bursting with theatregoers are glimpsed through the masklike face of Bette Davis. By obscuring the eyes, Menkes offers a measure of anonymity to her celebrated sources while revealing her own innate sense of privacy. The colour and style of hair also convey character, as in the thatch of vermilion hair in Rock (2010), clipped from a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, which crowns the head of an air guitar rocker partially derived from Justin Timberlake.

Among Menkes’s Themes series are her romantic, butterfly-related works, such as Bust and Butterfly (2018), where nature meets naturalism, and Woman with Tattoos (2018), where an image of Lena Dunham’s face is superimposed over her quote about tattoos. Menkes’s art and interior design training informs her Interiors series. Notably, Arch Cave (2014) and Hall of Mirrors (2013) vie with Versailles in their decorative excess. Not content merely to use found images of textiles, the artist assembles her own, as in the ornate blanket in Dressed Elephant (2018). Since 2015, she has also been developing compositions of densely-layered strips that, like screen grabs or excerpts from a film, suggest a story. Among these, Lady Sings the Blues (2016, front cover) juxtaposes Judy Garland’s face with a performer’s eye view of a huge crowd, while Outside In (2015, back cover) presents interior and exterior architectural spaces along with an approaching figure.

Ultimately, Patti Menkes champions the pleasure principle—the pleasure of looking at art and the satisfaction of making it. Her insouciant yet penetrating images reconfigure the flux of popular culture enhanced by her sure aesthetic sense. As for her composite figures, she says, “My personalities have a life of their own, which each viewer can imagine or create for themselves.” She appreciates that viewers will be tempted to guess whose famous grin or art collection they might be glimpsing. It’s not so much where such diverse elements come from, after all, but rather where they end up.

–Betty Ann Jordan, Toronto Arts Commentator