Barrett learned that many galleries shied away from exhibiting collage created by fellow artists. This reluctance on the part of gallery owners provided the impetus for Barrett to create an artist-focused venue exclusively devoted to collage and assemblage.
The collage works on display incorporate printed ephemera, photographs, magazine and newspaper cut outs. The collage styles are diverse and include tidy studies, thoughtful landscapes and colourful abstract art.
Assemblage art allows artists to "trash recycle," incorporating items that were previously trashed on the side of the road. This includes, but is not limited to, street signs, posters, pieces of wood, and trophy portions. Assemblage works on display have a rough, almost crude texture but still incorporate balanced design.
Assemblage and collage can take many forms. For example, on display at the Gallery was a tunnel book created by James MacSwain of the Halifax-based Manual Training Collective. Comprised of miniature photographs, viewing MacSwain's tunnel book is like wandering in a museum gallery filled with classic Greek and Roman statues.
A recent show entitled Put A Lid On It was dedicated to collage and assemblage
art incorporating jar lids. It explores what the expression "to put a lid on it" means to both the artist and
the viewer.An upcoming show called NOMNOM will feature "collage and assemblage works that use or employ food imagery, packaging, preparation utensils or similar for an upcoming show to coincide with the annual Nocturne - Art at Night event... October 14, 2023." Local collage and assembly artists whose work is featured at the Gallery include Peter Krause, Gavin Snow, Fraya McDougall as well as Rhonda Barrett.
Word of Barrett's Cuts & Paste Gallery has spread far beyond the borders of Halifax Regional Municipality, with internationally-based artists expressing interest and support.
Barrett hosts collage workshops at Cuts & Paste Gallery and artists are invited to use the facilities and the gallery's collage resources for a modest fee.
Cuts & Paste Gallery is found at Suite 101, 5663 Cornwallis Street, Halifax (enter from the door in the parking lot.) Open Tuesday to Saturday, 12 - 6 pm; Closed Sunday and Monday. You can also find them online at www.cutandpastegallery.com or on Instagram @cutsandpastegallery.
Review by Charles Salmon
In addition to being a seasoned printmaker, Rosvall is an accomplished textile artist. Her practice combines these two disciplines to produce subtle yet provocative work that challenge our artistic perceptions.
The individual prints are displayed on a Craig gallery wall and are assembled in a limited-edition book.
Also of interest to book and paper artists, is work by "Aglennco... a queer, multimedia artist who fabricates futures using printmaking, textiles and illustrations."
Crisp, clean paper sheets are attached at each end to two vertical metal screw posts that stand
about 2.5 feet tall. The square metal rod base is about a foot wide. Each sheet of paper is
separated from the other by evenly-spaced hexagon metal nuts. The 36 alternating sheets
cover both sides of the posts, gently overlapping and progressively covering each other, like
tree branches. When lifted, each page reveals an imprinted single line of text that stands
alone, yet connects to the preceding page and the page that follows. Symmetrical, graceful and
precise is the overall effect of this pushing-the-boundary book.
A singular rectangular gessoed canvas sheet with frayed sides and edges hangs like a medieval
banner on the gallery wall.
Instead of being elevated on a pedestal, this collage book's enormous open size (65" wide by
52" tall) demands that it be displayed on the gallery floor. Five double-page spreads of bold
collage pages (using paint, paper and photocopies) comprise this multi-layered, rough texture
book. 
Traditional quilts play with pattern and colour. This quilt plays with letters and words. The
medium is the metaphor - fragments of fabric comprise fragments of text.
This imposing (48" wide by 64.5" long) 12-panel quilt features white fabric block letters
appliquéd to a bold red fabric background. The resulting text message wraps around the quilt
border and circles inward. Sometimes the words appear in black fabric, calling out for our
attention, like bold face text. Curiously, sometimes the letters are not appliquéd, but pinned to
the fabric.
Celebration, (created in 2018), features six Victorian characters framed by a "proscenium arch" of salmon-coloured marbled paper. We the viewer are exposed to a playful scene from a doll's house of static paper dolls that are frozen in movement as they dance in a foyer, to music from a pianist and a minstrel. The outdoors beckon through garden gates in the background which frame a mottled blue sky.
Two biblical figures in the mid-ground are as equally captivated by this celestial sight, as the crowd of 1930s fedora-topped men and women wrapped in turbans and furs in the foreground. Like the viewers in the tunnel book, our gaze is directed to the focal point of this creation - the legendary planet Saturn.
At our group meeting yesterday, Joe Landry spoke to us about various box structures and presented a wide variety of samples from his collection.
The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artists' Book, is a retrospective exhibit of artists' books, currently on display at the 
The precision of these well-constructed artists' books is impressive. They consist mainly of editions versus one-of-a-kind creations.
Nicholas Shick's series of 9 books entitled Radiate, is pure eye candy with each volume being a series of shades of one rainbow colour. Bound using the drum leaf technique and letterpress printed on Mohawk superfine paper stock, the books are displayed with all the pages fanned out and is a visual magnet.
Lamination is used for a few books and these books in particular challenge our notion of book structure. Kate Laster's Yearbook Photo Missing consists of multi-coloured, laminated tinsel (that resembles ribbons) and found photos. However, it is the backs of the photos, each of which are each inscribed (and resemble cue cards), which face the viewer, not the photo image. And there is more transparent plastic than there is content. Blank paper pages in book construction are rarely questioned. Then why are pages that are made of transparent plastic so unsettling?
However, Kate Lester’s approach is not solely using cut-out patterns and graphics as Mexicans do, but Laster has substituted stylized letters of varying sizes that hint of folk art. The cut-out stencils get their power from seeing right through them. Laster also riffs on this form in Roadmap Accordion, where the book is laid out on the display table (like a road map) and the cut-out stencils get their power from the shadows created from the strong beam of light overhead. In this case, the message is amplified by the light and is ephemeral, like the material.
Stan Shellabarger has three accordion fold books on display, each of varying lengths, whose panels feature a series of swirly dots set against white and pale blue backgrounds, with solid dark blue front and back cover panels. The dots give this otherwise static display a fanciful sense of movement. Random dots are also used in Heidi Neilson's Atlas of Punctuation (letterpress in case binding), which only features periods. While the dots may appear randomly placed on the page, one is left wondering are they simply punctuation place holders for the text that has been completely removed.
