Kolaj Institute — Solo Residency Fundraiser.

The mission of Kolaj Institute is to support artists, curators, and writers who seek to study, document, and disseminate ideas that deepen our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement. We operate a number of initiatives meant to bring together community, investigate critical issues, and raise collage’s standing in the art world.

Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans includes a fully fitted bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen that allow us to provide housing for artists who come to New Orleans to develop their practice and make artwork. Kolaj Institute’s Solo Residencies are designed to provide artists, curators, and writers with dedicated time and space to work on a project.

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During their solo residency, Maine-based artist Drew Eastwood will further strengthen the metaphorical and material connection they hold within their practice. Using Kolaj Institute’s Archive, Library, & Collections, they will research and develop scholarship around their sculptural collage processes and their larger understanding of the expanding collage medium. In doing so, they will develop and engage with collage methodologies that ask the viewer to contend with the body: the body you inhabit and the body of constructed sculptures who will occupy the same space as yours. This proposed work asks the viewer to see themself in the objects—to see the ugliness, the faults, the concreteness, its roughness, its elasticity, its playfulness—and in doing so the viewer can begin to understand this world in its grotesque beauty.