Nicolas Lampert is yet another great midwestern artist who uses collage as a primary tool in his printmaking. Working out of Milwaukee, he’s involved in a wide variety of activist art projects — he was a co-editor of Peace Signs, co-organized the travelling Drawing Resistance show, and has written for Clamor Magazine.
His Oil Soldier poster, pictured at right, is a potent example of his collage work, and has been distributed widely as an agit-prop image for the antiwar movement. The poster is in the show (and also available for purchase online)
Nicolas is probably best known for his Machine Animal Collages, a series of collages he began in 1995. He writes:

Juxtaposition has been central to my visual language and the content that I explore. Contrasts and comparisons between animal/machine; nature/industrialism; indigenous/modern nation states; local economies/globalization have often been reoccurring themes. By pairing together opposites, the viewer is left to come to their own conclusion and to consider the reasons, circumstances and future possibilities of the two different entities – both alone and when they merge. The visual statement is to ask questions rather than provide concrete answers….
Aesthetically, the machine-animal collage series embraces the low resolution and the deteriorated quality of a Xerox copy. The photocopied images and the cut and paste methods working by hand produces images that become difficult to date. The images could be seen as a relic from the past, a lost scientific manual, or a Dada-like, Max Ernst-like collage image. Or the images could be seen as a contemporary work, a manual for a design for the future.

The Locust Tank piece, pictured at left, is my favorite of Nicolas’s collages. At almost four feet wide, the single impossible image has a hint of epicness about it. An even larger version of it was included in the Becoming Animal exhibition at Mass MoCA.
For more by Nicolas Lampert, see www.machineanimalcollages.com. This is the fifth in a series of previews from the July 27-28 beneft art show If They Come for You in the Morning.