Contemporary creatives often feel tasked with being innovative, creating something wholly new and unique. However, since the onset of Postmodern society this may have become both an impossibility and oversight. Rather artists often make more relevant and compelling work when they instead pull from the past and make it relevant for today. 

In Re:Assemble: Making the Old New Again exhibition at the Hapeville Depot Museum, the ReMerge Artist Collective explores this concept through a variety of media and artistic styles. This group of six female artists conceived of this theme to pay homage to Hapeville’s own history, understanding the lineage of production and factory spaces as well as the general artistic practice of approaching historic or traditional concepts from a new lens. The Hapeville Depot Museum itself fits the theme as it recognizes its own history and how it has morphed in purpose over the years from a utilitarian to now a more educational and creative space. 

• Ali O’Leary re-examines historic narratives of the American South using both vintage textiles and new photographic processes in mixed media works. 

• Alice Stone-Collins’ painted gouache collages collate the modern relics around us, considering how we are reassembling our identity in our congested digital lives. 

• Deonna Janone’s paintings bring together what is named and unnamed, seen and unseen in literary classics. These works reassemble recognizable elements with overall impressions into a new whole.

• Jessica Valderrama’s intimate graphite drawings renew the use of landscape. This once traditional subject now also functions as means to revisit their personal history and our collective connection to place.

• Lauren Merceron uses visual representation to connect to the contemporary moment. Layered abstract renderings of figures and mark-making reconsider identity roles (daughter, mother, creator, learner) in flux. 

• Morgan Auten’s color fields of geometric abstraction belies its own history when layers of colors and marks are covered up to find a new compositional conclusion and balance.

This collection of artists continually choose to make and produce from the tools around us, shaping the new out of the varying resources of our past and present.