Ada: A Series of Collages
Ada: A Series of Collages is the announcement card for Jack Walls's 2008 exhibition at Fuse Gallery in the East Village. Mounted at fifty, it was the Chicago-born artist's fine-art solo debut: collages cut from imagery sourced from Robert Mapplethorpe, whose partner and muse Walls had been through the 1980s.
The 4 × 6 inch card fronts one of the Ada works: a black-and-white studio portrait of a young man sliced into rhythmic crescent cuts and remounted on a pale painted ground, the figure surfacing between the blades. The reverse carries the particulars: February 23 through March 22, 2008 at 93 Second Avenue, the gallery in the back room of Lit Lounge, with an opening reception on the 23rd and a video installation by Zachary Stuart-Pontier. The card comes from Gallery 98, the online archive of downtown New York art ephemera.
Walls met Mapplethorpe in the early 1980s and remained his partner and muse until the photographer's death in 1989, then built a practice of his own across writing, painting, and collage, and became an elder to the downtown generation of Ryan McGinley, Dan Colen, and Dash Snow. He lives and works in Hudson, New York. This is the first Jack Walls item in the library, filed with the collage collection's ephemera.
