Top: Lesley Finn, tenant of beginning // sum of instinct and thought, from Quantum Divinations, 2026, paper and glue on book pages. Bottom: Installation view, from left to right: Helen Kauder, Homage a Miet Walrop, 2025, collage on paper; Lesley Finn, built on the inner river // cosmic outlier, from Quantum Divinations, 2025-26, paper and glue on book pages; Lesley Finn, guttural thing of the past // mid-air, a throaty ripple, from Quantum Divinations, 2026, paper and glue on book pages; Lesley Finn, tenant of beginning // sum of instinct and thought, from Quantum Divinations, 2026, paper and glue on book pages; Lesley Finn, dark edges, murmuring // hollow rapture, from Quantum Divinations, 2026, paper and glue on book pages; Lesley Finn, the trick of the stone // plan of existence, from Quantum Divinations, 2025-26, paper and glue on book pages;Matthew Shelley, untitled, 2026, collage on panel.
“What do you see when you don’t know what you are seeing?”
This question, posed by artist Lesley Finn, becomes a key to understanding Building Blocks, the current exhibition in the Keyes Gallery of the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library in Branford. Featuring collage artists Lesley Finn, Helen Kauder and Matthew Shelley, the exhibition asks viewers to reconsider not only how collage is constructed, but also how meaning itself is assembled through the act of looking.
While familiar with both Finn and Kauder’s work, Shelley’s was new to me, and all three artists were showing pieces I had not previously encountered. In this sense, viewing the exhibition was akin to collage itself: fragments slowly pieced together in the mind until they began to suggest a larger whole. Even the exhibition layout, I learned, emerged through this process of piecing together. The artists collaboratively installed the works to be in conversation with each other, rather than separating them into distinct sections as originally planned.
Helen Kauder, Untitled (Freehand Somatic Drawing 3), 2025, collage on paper.
Walking into the gallery, I first encountered large sections of vibrant color, intimate blocks of detail that demanded close inspection and compositions that initially reminded me of television static. Collage may often be associated with humor through irony and absurdity, or with punk aesthetics, but Building Blocks is quieter. The show approaches fragmentation not necessarily as disruption but more as a condition of careful looking.
Returning to the show after its opening reception allowed for a slower engagement with the work. If collage historically traces itself back to Dadaist strategies of disruption, chaos and unstable meaning, these artists are using it to cultivate uncertainty without confusion. Meaning emerges gradually through the viewer’s intuition and sustained attention. Rather than immediately “clicking” into place, the works ask viewers to remain in a state of observation.
All three artists share a tendency toward narrative abstraction, using juxtapositions that carry delicate resonance without resolving into concrete story. Finn’s works combine imagery associated with divination, astrology, engineering diagrams, and outdated instructional materials. These references to obsolete systems of knowledge function not only as subject matter, but also as compositional strategy. Meaning remains malleable and dependent on the viewer’s own interpretation.
Kauder’s collages resist singular narrative as well. Though almost shouting with color, they begin with freehand pencil drawings guided by her “somatic movement.” These outlines pop in and out from behind the colors, quietly revealing traces of her process.
Kauder’s source material, sections of Paris Métro advertisements that had begun separating from their postings after already accomplishing their intended narrative, introduces another layer of temporality and transformation. It allows discarded public imagery to become intimate and abstract: almost the opposite of what advertising is designed to do.
Matthew Shelley, untitled, 2026, collage on panel.
Shelley’s works engage fragmentation through photography and repetition. Using images of logs, dead marsh grasses, and other natural debris in varying states of decay, he carefully reconstructs photographs through circular cutouts that at first appear abstract before gradually resolving back into recognizable forms. What initially reads as visual chaos slowly reorganizes itself through sustained looking.
Shelley describes his process as one of “building up patterns and then breaking them apart again,” creating images that can feel disorienting or unstable. Without a fixed sense of gravity, light source, or consistent pattern, the works hover between order and disorder. Yet their careful construction also suggests an attempt to make sense of place through accumulation and reassembly, even when the image itself resists permanence.
Together, the works create not a singular story, but a shared feeling shaped by discarded materials, fragmentation, and time. In Building Blocks, collage becomes less an act of rupture than a method of reassembly: fragments reorganized into forms that remain open, unstable, and quietly alive.
Building Blocks runs at the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library, 146 Thimble Islands Road in Stony Creek, Conn., through June 8, 2026. Library hours and information at their website.