Phantom Tigers & Parallel Papers

"Paper has always been collage’s first accomplice and its most persistent trap. It has carried our stories, our orders, our borders. It has archived our memories and bureaucracies alike. In the Western imagination, paper has been both the vessel of knowledge and the tool of control—thin yet heavy with ideology.
This exhibition, Phantom Tigers and Parallel Papers, takes paper back from that history. It reclaims it as a generative material—fragile but ungovernable, resistant to classification. Here, paper is not background but protagonist; not support, but substance. The artists gathered in this show approach collage not as a format but as a political and poetic gesture."

Read the complete statement

Susana Blasco

Bio:

Based in Bilbao, Spain (1972), Susana Blasco is a graphic designer, collage artist, and visual creator. Her work, both graphic and artistic, has been featured in specialized media and included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Portugal, and across Spain. In 2017, she received a Gràffica Award for her contributions to the art of collage. She currently continues to combine her design practice with her ever-evolving artistic work.

Curatorial note:

In Susana Blasco’s hands, cutting becomes a way of joining things together. Her series transforms flowers into mosaics built from thin strips of paper, patiently woven until image and texture blur together.

Geometry meets instinct here, and what we finally see depends as much on perception as on memory.

Blasco’s practice lives between two temperaments: the precision of design and the warmth of remembrance. She dissects and rebuilds her images until they feel both tender and methodical, like structures made of air. The pieces speak quietly about how memory insists on order, and how emotion finds its own symmetry.

In these works, flowers are no longer decoration or symbol—they become acts of endurance. Each one appears through repetition, through the steady rhythm of a hand aligning fragments into coherence. They don’t bloom in the usual way; they surface slowly, woven from patience, loss, and the soft persistence of time.

Andrea Burgay

Bio:

Andrea Burgay creates collage-based works and collaborative projects that investigate paper and print media as sites of intimacy and connection, exploring cycles of destruction and renewal through their transformation. She is the founder and editor of Cut Me Up Magazine, a curatorial project in which readers respond to published artworks by reimagining and reconfiguring them, creating an ongoing visual dialogue among artists.

Curatorial note:

Andrea Burgay works like an archaeologist of emotion. Her materials—old magazines, faded prints, fragments of discarded paper—arrive already charged with stories. She tears, sands, glues, and buries them again under new surfaces, letting time and touch decide what survives.

In her collages, paper behaves like skin: holding traces of what has been removed. Layers are not only aesthetic choices but gestures of care, of refusal to let go completely. The act of reconstruction becomes both healing and rebellion—a quiet defiance against disappearance.

Burgay’s compositions often seem to hover between decay and bloom. What looks fragile at first reveals a pulse underneath, a sense of rebirth. Each piece could be a relic or a seed. In this way, she turns collage into a ritual of transformation: art not as preservation of the past, but as the ongoing negotiation between what remains and what we allow to change.

Jack Felice

Bio:

Jack Felice is a graduate of Florida State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing and a minor in Art History. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Fla.

His artwork has appeared in The Florida Review, 14 Hills, Drim Space, The New Republic, Tagvverk, Meridian, and The Weird Show.

Curatorial Note:

For Jack Felice, what’s hidden can be as potent as what remains visible.

His collages begin with found images—vintage magazines, old print matter—yet his true interest lies in the transformation: choosing what to preserve, what to suppress, and where to let silence intervene.

He often works quickly, without lingering too long on any fixed decision, avoiding predictable paths. What he covers, what he erases, becomes a space of possibility—a gap for perception to wander. Beneath the layers of cut paper, tape, or collage edges, faint ghosts of imagery persist, offering a tension between absence and trace.

His collage surfaces are materials: he cares as much about paper type, texture, ink imperfections, dog-ears, blemishes, and discolorations as about composition itself. Where he once discarded imperfect pages, now he celebrates them, letting the quirks of time and handling add voice to the work. The layering of tape—its removal, its revealing of white pulls—and the act of obscuring images both invite us to dwell, to peer, to fill in meaning.

Through what is withheld, Felice cultivates openness. His work does not dictate a narrative; it allows us to roam the edges of image and void, to sense the ghosts between cuts and the space that emerges from erasure.

Alma Haser

Bio:

Born in 1989 into an artistic family in the Black Forest, Germany, Alma Haser is now based in SouthEast England. She is known for her complex and meticulously constructed photographs, which are influenced by her creativity and her background in fine art. Alma creates striking work that catches the eye and captivates the mind, often calling in question the nature of what is real.

Alma has won many awards for her work, including Magenta Foundation's Bright Spark Award for her Cosmic Surgery series (also the basis of a successful self-published book project). Her piece The Ventriloquist won fourth prize for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. Alma also won the PDN Photo Annual Award for her Eureka Effect series. Her work has been exhibited worldwide.

Curatorial note:

In Alma Haser’s new series, the body becomes both subject and surface. Working with her own photographs, she treats the printed image as a second skin—folding, layering, and shaping paper directly over her face and body until the boundary between image and flesh begins to blur. Shadows and reflections appear like echoes, fragments of self that resist being fixed in two or three dimensions.

What we see is not a portrait but a dialogue between presence and projection. Haser uses paper as a material that records contact, that carries the trace of light and touch at once. The results oscillate between sculpture and photograph, illusion and document, a continuous negotiation of space and perception.

Among the artists in this exhibition, Haser is perhaps the one who most explicitly embodies The Weird Show’s central question: why is this a collage? Her work stretches the definition of the medium until it almost dissolves, showing that collage is not defined by its tools but by its attitude—a willingness to inhabit the uncertain, to cross borders, to stay in the weird territory where image and matter converge.

Paul Henderson

Bio:

Paul Henderson is an artist and arts worker with a tertiary interest in graphic design and self-publishing. Primarily working in collage, he has participated in residencies and exhibited his award-winning work across Canada and around the world. A frequent collaborator with the independent music community, his work has been featured on numerous album covers, posters, and videos. Paul has also been working as a community organizer, arts administrator, and graphic designer for over 20 years. He has a BFA from the Alberta University for the Arts.

Curatorial note:

In Paul Henderson’s work, the line between image and abstraction is always unsettled. His collages hold together bodies and fragments that shouldn’t belong to the same world. Figures emerge from the cuts only to dissolve again into pattern, texture, or void. The result is a strange equilibrium: order built from rupture.

Henderson uses cutting as a way to measure the distance between recognition and distortion. His fragments often retain traces of their origin—hands, faces, symbols—but they no longer obey the logic that once defined them. Connections appear abrupt, even violent, as if the act of joining carried a quiet aggression. Beneath the surface, a tension hums between beauty and fracture. What looks precise is never stable. The more the pieces fit, the more their seams reveal themselves. Henderson’s collages remind us that every image contains its own undoing, that what seems coherent is often stitched from conflict.

Miko Hornborg

Bio:

Miko Hornborg is an artisan painter, a beatmaker and a self-taught visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland, working primarily with analog collage and assemblage. His practice centers on fictional landscapes that explore memory, perception, and place. Through layered compositions constructed from found imagery, Hornborg creates imaginative visual spaces.

His work has been exhibited in various galleries in Finland , as well as internationally at venues including the Dowd Fine Arts Center (USA), Sala del Museo de la Pasión (Spain), and Hola Haus (Argentina). His collages are also included in the Saastamoinen Foundation’s collection

Curatorial note:

Miko Hornborg works in the quiet zone where collage almost disappears. His compositions dissolve the seams that usually define the medium—no visible cuts, no glue, no raw edges. What remains is a sense of tension between construction and illusion, as if the image had come into being on its own.

His work hides the gesture of making. Fragments are blended until they lose their boundaries, and the surface turns opaque, secretive. The viewer feels something has been rearranged, but can’t quite locate where the operation took place. In Hornborg’s universe, collage becomes camouflage: a way of questioning authorship, of confusing origin and copy, of erasing the difference between fabrication and apparition.

There’s humor and danger in his restraint. The works seem minimal at first glance, but their silence holds a nervous energy. They lie, play, and seduce—echoing the artist’s own phrase, “Bauhaus on acid.” Each image is a construction that pretends to be a fact, a trick that turns art into a mirror for our own faith in the visible.

Mark Wagner

Bio:

Born at the tail end of thirteen children, Mark Wagner grew up rural-poor in the heartland of the United States. A life-long remedial reader, Wagner was attracted to art at least partially due to its light reading load. Wagner almost totally missed the '90s... distracted not just by drinking, sex, and drug use, but by esoteric experiments into collage, assemblage, and publishing. A formative 13 years in New York City have added a healthy dose of urban cynicism to his folksy midwestern charm. Now thoroughly middle-classed, he lives with his family in Lancaster Pennsylvania... playing with the kids and hatching plans for the downfall of capitalism.

Curatorial note:

Mark Wagner has spent years dissecting the American dollar, transforming it from a symbol of trust and power into a material for questioning those very ideas. In his work for Phantom Tigers and Parallel Papers, that critique takes an explicit, even humorous form: George Washington sits at a desk, speech bubble in hand, asking simply—”America WhatThe Fuck?” Rendered entirely from sliced and recomposed U.S. banknotes, the piece is both surgical and satirical. Every element—the engraved borders, the serial numbers, the fragments of Washington’s own portrait—becomes part of a visual language turned against itself. The precision of the cut amplifies the absurdity of the message: authority literally speaking back to its creators. The phrase, translated into nine languages, stretches the image’s meaning beyond national borders. Wagner’s collage becomes a multilingual echo of disbelief, a global response to a fractured present. It’s an acrobatic gesture in both form and intent: turning limited material into complex critique, elegance into protest.

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Country/Region

Country/Region

Susana Blasco

Reinventario 01

Reinventario 03

Flores

Floral 02

Floral 01

Andrea Burgay

Infinite Torment (Inferno)

Granny Squares

Growing Up You

Room to Dream

False Starts

Imparting In Parting

Jack Felice

Flowers For The Horses

Data Entry

Theoretical Race Car Driver

The Thrill Of An Above Ground Pool

Sparks, Statues, Swimming Pools [PartI]

The Waves

Horse In Snow

Alma Haser

Missing Hand

Too Many Fingers

The Pointing Finger

In The Palm Of My Hand

Paul Henderson

Blues Singer

No Frills Beauty Queen

Untitled

Handshake Man

Broken Jogger

Miko Hornborg

Soft Morning

It’s Not What You Know

Bottom Layers

Temporary Escape

Sandbox Memories

Shadows Of Tomorrow

Mark Wagner

WTF Spanish

WTF Portuguese

WTF Italian

WTF German

WTF French

WTF English

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