Stellarhighway is honored to present Stamp Collecting, a solo show of photographic work by Sas Colby featuring ten pieces from her series of artist/photo stamps. The group of work presented features unique artist books, vintage collages and hand-painted Cibachrome prints. Stamp Collecting, a title borrowed from an artist book within this series, is the second time this important and virtually unknown body of work is being shown en masse in nearly 40 years, the first instance being at The Photographer’s Gallery in London in 1986.

After five decades of creating, exhibiting and teaching, Sas Colby’s practice has incorporated textile, collage, painting, and photography, and she is considered a pioneer in the fields of artist books and Feminist art. Colby is, alongside Robert Watts and Anna Banana, also one of the first artists to produce artist stamps. However, whereas Watts' and Anna Banana's stamps rely on a graphic printing process and paper, Colby's stamps are miniaturized photographs on photographic paper. Considering this, and her aforementioned solo exhibition at The Photographer's Gallery featuring this body of work, Colby is likely also the first maker to bring artist stamps into the world of photography.

A friendship with Anaïs Nin and influences such as the work of Gertrude Stein are reflected in Colby's unusual use of text. Images and words for her are a visual medium as well as a cognitive experience, and she imbues her objects with this reverence. Often, the intimate scale of a piece requires interaction from the viewer, such as careful looking, the turning of a page or the opening of a box. Throughout her work Colby plays with the audience's associative instinct via precise juxtapositions of text, image and composition, and the body that resulted from the artist’s pursuit of photography is a premier example of this.

Colby’s approach to photography is free from technical considerations: she worked with a simple 35mm or, her favorite, a 1939 Brownie camera. She regards her engagement with the medium as an additive process, with an idea only completed by juxtaposing the images in different ways, by altering them with drawing, cutting or collage, or by adding text. Between 1982 and 1988 Colby had many of her images printed, rephotographed, reduced in size and cluster-printed at the size of postage stamps by a lab in Florida, becoming grids of twenty-five multiple miniature prints on photographic paper. Each sheet was then gummed and perforated using an antiquated machine. The resulting “photo stamps” were combined in small compositions or with text to create visual narratives. Elaborating on the idea of stamps, the prints were sometimes canceled with various personal imprints, mimicking postal cancellations. Over the years, the artist took and selected for this process candid images of her friends and relatives that feel as if they could be a part of any family album; parts of advertisements and signage she encountered; scenes from her walks and wanderings; works from art history; and, her own staged studio vignettes, collages and self portraits. As the artist writes in the forward to her volume Keeping Time (1992), "I photograph out of curiosity, as if the images will provide me with answers to life’s daily dilemmas. The subject matter is frequently a symbolic act or an ordinary scene that hints at life's mysteries - love, death, destiny. I want my images to evoke the miracle and wonder of life."

In Red Nude Running (c. 1983) we see a figure [the artist] streaking across a field of tall grass on the edge of dense forest. The image is severely discolored (blood red with a streak of bright yellow on the left to which the figure seems to run) and repeated twenty-five times in miniature, presented as a full sheet of stamps. The small collages disrupt this repetition: Cat Play (2019) takes a vertical strip of four stamps from two different sheets and places them side-by-side—two lovers faces brought close, one finger paused upon two lips, paired to a cat’s face staring hypnotically into the camera. Ear Play (2019) replaces the center stamp of a nine-by-nine stamp arrangement depicting a hand playing a piano with an image of an ear. Instead of tearing the ear from its sheet of stamps, Colby has cut that image out at its borders and adhered it directly on top of the other sheet of playing hands. Bridging the formal approach of those two other collages, Shadow Play (2019) presents variants of the same scene, as if taken moments apart. This time, instead of cutting the images out, Colby has torn two full stamps from one sheet to position them against the mirrored shape of another sheet, torn to match, in order to construct a rectangle. The free, final stamp of this group of eight tilts slightly out from the others as if removed or just joining.

More formally recognizable as photography, Beach I (1985) is a Cibachrome print showing the bust of a figure silhouetted behind an eccentrically patterned sheer shawl. The photo stamps bordering the exterior of the print present the same view of the figure, though this time they are in the midst of wrapping their head in the shawl. For Suitcase I (1986) and Suitcase IV (1986), Colby repurposed Cibachrome prints she had made of the interiors of suitcases seen at flea markets in the Bay Area, and cleverly incorporated her photo stamps within the prints via X-Acto knife. The artist book Stamp Collecting (1983-87) unveils a litany of Colby’s photo stamps, many not seen elsewhere in the body of work. Its hand-bound matte black pages are interrupted by white cardstock and torn windows to forthcoming/previous pages. Ripped and cut pieces of patterned papers, a champagne cork foil, a page from a pocket dictionary, the imprint of a distressed envelope and other life ephemera are composed throughout, scrapbook-style, its narrative unclear. This book, and the artist’s entire body of photographic work, is immediate and gratifying. It pulls joyously at the depths of our individual and collective psyches while engaging various art histories. Tackling ideas of re-photography, reproduction and appropriation, and in the spirit of Fluxus, Dada and Surrealism, Colby meters out a lifetime spent exploring the methods of anticipation that the human mind enlists to order the world, shuffling one’s expectations of what is, what should be or what could be.

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A commemorative limited edition of fifty artist books was produced for this exhibition; titled ‘Four Suitcases,’ it pairs photographs by Sas Colby with poetry by Christine Hemp. Since the 1986 solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, Colby’s photo stamp series has been shown in part at The Oakland Museum and The Gray Loft Gallery, and published in Fun Size (Jen Tough Gallery, Santa Fe, NM). Artist books, collages and prints from this series reside in important private collections worldwide, and public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Oakland Museum and Mills College Special Collection at the Olin Library.