COLLAGED REALITIES: Photography and Mixed Media

“Fountain Gallery's mission of support, exploration, and celebration of the complex interconnection of mental health and creativity is important and transformative, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to present Peter Wooster’s cornucopias of images here,” said Patterson Sims, a New York City-based independent art curator, writer, and consultant, who is Chairman of The Board of Independent Curators International and President of the Leon Polk Smith Foundation. Sims has also been affiliated with OK Harris Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Montclair Art Museum. “Peter's art cleverly concretizes, connects and aesthetizes the vast and all-inclusive media-saturated and ‘Google Image’ world in which we now all dwell,” continued Sims. “Presenting his work in the context of three Fountain Gallery artists – Azure Bourne, Martin Cohen, and Julio Mendoza – adds breadth and perspective to Wooster's way of seeing the world as agglomerations of incessant and fractured realities.” In explaining his decision to show Wooster with the three Fountain Gallery artists, Sims noted, “Though previously unknown to one another, Wooster and Martin Cohen utilize a highly similar omnivorous and compulsive photo collage methodology, yet do so with strikingly different worldviews and increments of imagery. Azure Bourne's lyric and whimsical visual poetry marries scrapes and cast-offs, and Julio Mendoza deftly manipulates commonplace trademark images and paper fragments into simple yet trenchant visual fables."