KC Studio published this article in its July/August edition.

A passion for collage started early for Andrea Burgay. When she was 4 or 5 in Syracuse, New York, she had what she described as a “seminal experience” with a stack of magazines and catalogues.

“My mother helped me make an alphabet book,” Burgay recalls. “I would cut these pictures out and glue them down, and when I was done, she stapled it together.”

She later studied drawing, painting and sculpture, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. About a decade ago, Burgay returned to collage — incorporating found objects into her works, such as books.

An exhibition featuring her Fictions series opened June 1 at the Central Library’s Genevieve Guldner Gallery and runs through Aug. 17. Eighteen works incorporating deconstructed paperback books are on view — and about half of these are new.

Growing up, Burgay says she spent a lot of time reading in libraries, but this marks the first time her artwork has been on display in one.

“I wanted to bring these works back to where they came from in terms of my own life and my own history with books. The interest in working with books — and then later the interest in transforming them,” she says.

Craig Auge, the Library’s exhibits coordinator, is also an artist and designer who works in mixed media, found object assemblage and collage. Auge’s work has been featured in Burgay’s participatory collage magazine, Cut Me Up, where artists are asked to respond to artwork and transform it for the next issue.

“I got to know her own work through the magazine and just kind of fell in love with what she was doing,” he says. Collage might conjure up a certain kind of aesthetic, he says, but Burgay is “pushing the boundaries. She’s almost painting or sculpting with paper.”

For the Fictions series, Burgay starts with paperback books found in thrift stores or at used book sales. She says she selects them “based on colors or textures that resonate, a title or phrase that I connect with, and the physicality of the paper.” 

The books are then stored in her studio for a holding period. Next, she says, begins “the strange process of kind of letting go of the preciousness of it and the dismantling of it.”

Burgay takes each book apart, cutting and tearing individual pieces and saving them. She stacks the cover’s surface with thick layers, often repeating the steps of adding and dismantling several times. 

One example: a bright piece with a yellow background called Ecotopia: A Future That Works. The central image is environmental, depicting the Earth. 

Burgay’s labor-intensive approach “mirrors the passage of time.” 

“So, it’s showing weathering, destruction and regrowth,” she says, “as I put it back together in a new form, while preserving elements of what’s there.”

Burgay adds, “And I like that effect of chance and the ideas of nature having its own pass through them.”

To create more sculptural forms, she glues the pages together to “evoke something that was either, like, soaked with water and then preserved or damaged by wind or rain or some kind of effect like that.”

Burgay views this series as an expression of her love of books, since she’s taking discarded “bottom-of-the-barrel” books and giving new life to them.

“This idea of kind of destroying them, making them something new, might seem, you know, sacrilegious to people,” she says. “But I really wanted to just make clear, you know, through the process, through the delicacy of the way I handle them, and the detail of them, that I wanted to make them into special objects.”

Auge says he wants to curate exhibitions in the Library related to books or book art, but what he likes about Burgay’s work is that it’s not “on the nose.”

“It’s sort of honoring the book in a different way. And it opens up conversations around storytelling through her approach to collage,” he says. “These paperbacks are often just throwaways, so she’s saving them and repurposing them in a meaningful way.”

Join artist Andrea Burgay and the Library's Craig Auge on Saturday, August 3, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. for an artist talk and collage workshop. Find out more and RSVP here.