{"id":53789,"date":"2025-08-08T05:31:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T05:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/53789\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T05:31:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T05:31:09","slug":"collage-art-is-surging-in-popularity-as-a-crowd-hungry-for-offline-activities-finds-a-new-way-to-stick-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/53789\/","title":{"rendered":"Collage art is surging in popularity as a crowd hungry for offline activities finds a new way to stick together"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside the Toronto<\/a> magazine shop Issues, the shelves are stacked with beautiful indie publications, the kind that are so artful they become permanent fixtures on coffee tables. In a few minutes, older editions of those magazines will be ripped, snipped, X-Acto-knifed and hole-punched, then Frankensteined into one-of-a-kind paper collages. <\/p>\n

Fifteen women sit at a hulking cobalt blue table covered with the magazines, as well as vintage books, postcards, jewels, stickers and other ephemera. <\/p>\n

Alanna Chelmick, the multidisciplinary artist who is facilitating the event this evening, offers some guidance before the collaging officially begins: Don\u2019t overthink it. <\/p>\n

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Alanna Chelmick, the evening\u2019s host, looks over participants\u2019 work at Issues Collage Night at Issues Magazine Shop in Toronto.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust pull what calls to you for some reason,\u201d Chelmick says. \u201cIt might be a colour, an animal, texture or shape. Let it go, and just pull the page out.\u201d With that parting advice, she turns up the music and a flurry of hands start grabbing magazines. <\/p>\n

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Issues has hosted bi-monthly collaging evenings in its west-end shop for nearly three years, attracting a wide swath of avid crafters and first-timers, Gen-Z friends, mother-daughter combos, date nights and work colleagues. The workshops always sell out, and similar gatherings have popped up in cities across Canada \u2013 proof that while collaging may evoke middle-school sleepovers, it\u2019s being revived as a creative outlet for a new crowd hungry for offline social interactions. <\/p>\n

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Collage nights are part of a larger rise of analogue, old-timey events.<\/p>\n

Collage nights are part of a larger rise of analogue, old-timey events such as chess clubs, board game nights, silent reading clubs or speed puzzle competitions. The appeal is partly to meet new people somewhere other than bars, and partly as an antidote to infinite doom-scrolling. None require a screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cOften people say, \u2018I typed all day\u2019 or \u2018I was at my computer all day\u2019 and I just wanted to do something with my hands,\u201d Chelmick says. <\/p>\n

Nicola Hamilton, the owner of Issues and a magazine art director, dreamed up the idea with Chelmick after opening the shop in 2022 and witnessing the amount of paper waste accumulating every month. After a magazine\u2019s sale date passes, many distributors require shops to destroy the issues. \u201cIt had been bothering me watching the pile of recycling and thinking about how much work and energy went into making publications, just for them to go to waste.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friends Ritu Kanal and Samantha Hansel originally tried out collaging, and crafting more generally, because they wanted to get away from their screens. \u201cAs we started hanging out more, we both realized that we\u2019re on a screen so much and that we wanted to do tactile things,\u201d says Kanal, as she cuts out a butterfly from a vintage nature book. <\/p>\n

On average, Canadians spent just 18 minutes a day on \u201cactive leisure\u201d in 2022 according to Statistics Canada, a category that includes drawing, painting, crafting, writing, dancing and knitting. In contrast, Canadians spent an average of 3.2 hours a day<\/a> gazing at their smartphones. <\/p>\n

Ritu Kanal, second from right, started collaging as a way to get away from screens and do more tactile things.<\/p>\n

Hansel, who works as a graphic designer, says she spends so much time in the digital world of software and apps, she notices it infiltrating her IRL (in real life) art practice. The morning of the collage event, she recalls working on a project and yearning for command Z, the computer shortcut for undo. <\/p>\n

\u201cI want to make a copy, shift it over, make a duplicate, and you can\u2019t,\u201d says Hansel. \u201cSo with this you have to force yourself to be uncomfortable a little bit.\u201d <\/p>\n

Jumping on the trend \u2013 and Gen Z\u2019s penchant for nostalgia \u2013 both Pinterest and Instagram<\/a> both have released features to create digital collages, while other design apps such as Shuffles and Zeen have been launched specifically for making collages to share on social media. <\/p>\n

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Catherine Lash (white T-shirt) and other participants share their finished collages with the group.<\/p>\n

For others, it\u2019s the constraints of making art in the physical world that brought them out. \u201cI collage digitally, and I wanted to try the real deal,\u201d says Catherine Lash, who uses the program Pixelmator to make her collages. \u201cI can be really precise and what I love about this is, you can\u2019t be as precise. I\u2019m excited for that challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

With around 15 minutes left in the workshop, Chelmick calls out the \u201cglue warning,\u201d an alert that participants should start actually pasting the clippings they\u2019ve collected over the past hour and a half. A few exclaim how quickly the time passed. <\/p>\n

For Hamilton, this time blindness has to do with not having any other distractions. <\/p>\n

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Nicola Hamilton, the owner of Issues Magazine Shop, explains that during the collage-making process, ‘there is no downtime to open Instagram or look at your e-mail.’<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s something about the making of things that requires you to use your hands, to busy your hands, that keeps you off your phone for a chunk of time. There is no downtime to open Instagram or look at your e-mail,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n

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After two hours, the big blue table has disappeared under layers of cut-outs, toppled towers of magazines and overturned glue sticks. The floor has grown a carpet of scrap paper. <\/p>\n

Chelmick asks if anyone wants to share their collage with the group. Lash, the digital collager, holds up hers. \u201cI was inspired by your words, just rip what feels good. That really authentic, visceral reaction,\u201d she says, as she presents her collage, featuring a woman with a butterfly for a head alongside cut-outs of owls. \u201cI don\u2019t know what it means.\u201d <\/p>\n

The table erupts in \u201coohs\u201d and \u201coh that\u2019s beautiful\u201d and \u201cthat\u2019s so well done.\u201d <\/p>\n

Since the collage night, Lash has continued paper-collaging to get away from the computer, embracing the imperfections that come with it. <\/p>\n

\u201cI love the tactile aspect of the collaging and the messiness.\u201d<\/p>\n

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