Workshop Series: How to Treat an Image
Photography captures a moment, but what happens when we intervene in that moment? How to Treat an Image is a workshop series exploring physical and conceptual interventions into the photographic image. Through acts of destruction, manipulation, and reconstruction, participants will push photography beyond its traditional boundaries, questioning its role as a fixed record.
Blurring the lines between photography, sculpture, and performance, this series challenges participants to rethink photographic materiality. Whether working with their own images or found materials, they will engage in processes that transform photography into a tactile, multidimensional form of storytelling.
Series (all 3 How to Treat an Image Workshops): $310 (Members) / $360 (Non-Members)
Individual Workshop: $90 (Members) / $80 (Non-Members)
Rearrange and Reimagine
Experiment with how cutting, shifting and recomposing can disrupt an image to create a new visual language that challenges narrative, memory and form. In this hands-on collage workshop, explore two core techniques Erin McGean has developed in her practice: one that involves slicing and interlacing images to form woven compositions and another that reconstructs them into tile-based patterns reminiscent of mosaics.
The workshop encourages intuitive play as much as structural intention, offering a space to reconsider the meanings embedded in found photography. Participants can bring a collection of their imagery, old family photos, vintage ephemera, or discarded prints. A curated selection of found materials will also be available.
No previous experience is necessary, just an interest in working with your hands and rethinking the familiar. By the end, participants will leave with their own reassembled artwork. All materials will be provided.
Erin McGean is a collage artist whose work explores the space between memory and distortion, using found photographs as raw material for reassembly. She is drawn to the tactile history of vintage imagery, faded portraits, forgotten scenes, discarded prints and uses techniques of slicing, rearranging, and layering to disrupt the original narrative and create something entirely new. Her collages often reference pattern, repetition, and rhythm, hovering between abstraction and figuration.
Blending analog and digital approaches, McGean’s process involves both precision and intuition, often beginning with hand-cut work and extending into digital refinements. Much of her recent work investigates themes of feminine identity, surface versus depth, and the ways in which images shape our collective memory.
Active in both physical and digital art spaces, McGean’s work has been exhibited internationally and collected across platforms. Her pieces reflect a commitment to reimagining the past, not only as nostalgia, but as raw material for transformation.
