ARTifacts

Robert Motherwellheld that “collage is the 20th century’s greatest innovation.” Devotees of video art, Moog synthesizers, and PEZ may have a bone to pick with this notion, but from Duchamp to Dash Snow, collage holds up as a pretty sturdy art framework, even as late as 10 years into the 21st century. This First Friday, Cactus Bra hosts Austin-based collage-ista Leslie Mutchler, whose website is entrancing: Her past work includes collages of advertising materials, which may sound like nothing new, but her sly, arresting appropriations of furniture-catalog images serve as material meditations on the mass-fabrication of consumer desire. Sound too fancy? What I mean is, she takes all the compulsively fun elements of looking at, say, a Pottery Barn catalog, and recombines them to make you examine how seductively manipulative advertising is. She’s also assembled “furniture landscapes” from some actual shelving-unit kits, ideal storage for nothing and everything. Friday, whe will use recycled paper and rye grass to make structures based on Le Corbusier’s “Quartiers Modernes Frugès,” those boxy utilitarian paeans to negative space. Her mini-utopia is built to collapse, and is a one-night-only exhibition. 6-9 p.m. October 2, 106c Blue Star, cactusbraspace.com.