Extended reunion

Jane Rosemont returns to Lansing with strange new friends

When artist, photographer and filmmaker Jane Rosemont returned to Lansing last week to attend a reception for her first-ever exhibition of collage art at the Nelson Gallery, there was much rejoicing, hugging and catching up among the three-dimensional beings in attendance.

Rosemont lived in the Lansing area from 1978 to 2010, when she moved to Santa Fe with her husband, Dick, co-founder of the East Lansing record store Flat, Black and Circular.

A plethora of local artists and Rosemont admirers joined the happy reunion, but only half the faces in the gallery were smiling.

The two-dimensional faces on the walls stared blankly at the laughing wine drinkers with torn and scissored eyes, preoccupied by their own disturbing thoughts.

Collages give Rosemont the godlike power to break the world down and put it back together, using her wicked powers of observation, sharp eye for detail and cheerful eagerness to give in to the next perverse impulse — to turn a church upside down, sand off someone’s face or drop a deadly-looking spider onto a wedding photo.

“Maybe it’s because I went to Catholic school,” she said. “Everything had to be perfect, not just in the classroom, but our hair had to be perfect. You can see how I respond to that.” She glanced upward at her gravity-defying, copper-hued coif.

“When I’m working, I can go, ‘I’ll just stick some masking tape on that.’ You’re making a mess of it, but really, it’s not a mess at all.”

Rosemont has created collages most of her life but until recently considered it a “side thing,” behind photography and filmmaking.

After four arduous years working on her latest film, “Acting Like Nothing Is Wrong,” she was ready for something that “feels like home.” The film, a documentary about the troubled life and career of Hollywood character actor Jim Hoffmaster, is awaiting distribution.

“I have no intention of making another film,” she said. “I just wanted to get back to collage, and it’s great. I love the solitude. I love the sounds of the cutting and the tearing.”

Rosemont works without a plan, cutting, placing and rearranging widely varied source materials until they coalesce into a story that surprises even her.

“It turned out that they were all about people,” she said. “Thus, the name of the show: ‘Relatives You Didn’t Know You Had.’”

Collages let Rosemont mash her many skills into one big subconscious soup. Many are fashioned from photos she took. Others feature painterly touches — markers, crayon, acrylic paint and other media — applied directly on the surface. The urge to tell a story, common to both filmmaking and collage, is a powerful source of inspiration.

Some of the collages appear fussy and meticulous; others are rough and wild. None are random.

The most disturbing long-lost relative visitors discover in the Nelson Gallery show appears in a black-and-white collage entitled “Is Smoking Glamorous?”

The jagged image overlays a photo of a smoker, taken by Rosemont, onto another Rosemont photo of a nastily mutilated doll.

“I photographed her in our home, and there’s no smoking in our home,” Rosemont said. “I asked her if she wanted a cigarette, and she said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ It was supposed to be a prop. But she smoked this sucker.”

On second or third look, “The Black Widow” comes into focus as more than a handful of old family photographs with a pleasant but stiff vibe. Rosemont doesn’t do boring.

“It was too nice of a story for my taste,” she said. She took some sandpaper to the whole thing and applied a large, looming, lacy spider. Clever color matching and cutting make the image eye-foolingly tight and nightmarishly realistic.

The only smiling face on the wall is that of Dick Rosemont, immortalized by his wife in a lovingly composed mosaic of record label memorabilia.

Rosemont’s collages bear the strong influence of one of her favorite artists, Robert Rauschenberg, a restless 20th-century visionary who blended painting, sculpture, photography and printmaking with “real” objects like pebbles, scrap metal, sand and even bicycles.

“Behold a World of Abundance” is a seamless fantasia of finely etched architectural photographs and drawings. Every element looks precisely planned, but not so. Rosemont glued on one piece of the collage to cover a blood spot from a paper cut, but it looks perfectly matched with the element beneath it.

“There’s blood behind here,” she said. “But I love the way it turned out.”

Not only does Rosemont plan to keep on making collages; she can hardly help it. Working at home is pure joy.

“My cats are there. Dick is there. If I’m inspired at midnight, I work at midnight,” she said.

And inspiration comes from all directions. Last week, she overheard a woman saying, “I never met a potato I didn’t like.”
“If that doesn’t sound like an inspiration for a collage, I don’t know what does,” she said. “We’ll see what comes out of that in the next show.”