Palette

This work is from Chabet’s China Collage series which he began in 1980 and numbers over 300 works. These collages were his “picture morgue,” made from papers amassed from his personal archives of books, magazines, clippings, letters, postcards, bills, receipts, drawings, and scribbles. He layered these remnants on a map that showed China, Mongolia, and Korea, parts of which could still be seen in earlier works but eventually became completely covered in later pieces. For Chabet, these collages were like taking “the slow boat to China” with these curious papers as the main cargo. This work includes pages from an Orientations magazine dated 1971, several envelopes (one addressed to him), scribbles of the word collage in his own handwriting, and pushpins. They are fragments of an artist’s personal life, a snapshot of things that he surrounded himself with during the time that he was creating this specific work.