Call for Issue 05: Summer 2020
Curated by Valerie Hegarty

Deadline for submissions: April 1, 2020

Envisioning Utopia

“Even if you doubt your utopia is attainable, it can serve as a useful thought experiment. Imagine a really good world, and imagine how we can get there. All progress begins with such wishful thinking.”

-John Horgan, Scientific American 

This issue of Cut Me Up embarks on a triage mission to resuscitate the fragments of yesterday’s news that have been salvaged, slashed and sheared, then transmuted in response to the current global landscape in Issue 4. At this critical juncture, my directive endeavors to find the seeds for a hopeful tomorrow.

For Cut Me Up Issue 5, artists are called upon to consider a contemporary problem and create an imaginative solution. Using methods and materials associated with positivity and healing, artists are asked to form order from chaos, create figures from fragments and organize realist compositions from abstractions. Excavating contemporary news sources will yield visual clues to be coalesced into future Utopias.

Like a new world vision board, the results could be: an Arcadian landscape in the face of climate change, a visionary interior as a reaction to the public housing crisis or a figurative paradise formed in response to social injustice. The solutions are as endless as the problems.

As if turning back the pages to an unspoiled source, this reverse directive will suture together a unified utopian order full of optimistic possibility, scavenged from yesterday’s shattered world.

– Valerie Hegarty, Visual Artist

To submit artwork responses:

  • Use recent media that describes a contemporary problem.

  • Use any methods and/or materials that you associate with positivity and healing.

  • Create a composition that expresses realism.

  • All eligible submissions must incorporate some portion or portions of Cut Me Up: Issue 4.

  • Artwork responses may be in any media and may incorporate other materials.

Issue 5 Curator Valerie Hegarty

Valerie Hegarty is a visual artist based in Brooklyn who conceptually and formally collages art history themes with contemporary issues to create paintings, sculptures and installations. Special projects have included an outdoor commission for the High Line in New York City, a large-scale installation in a former chapel at Drew University in New Jersey and three installations in the historic American period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. Her most recent solo show at Malin Gallery in New York City in 2019 was reviewed in The New York Times. Recent group shows venues include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, The Saatchi Gallery in London and the Peabody Essex museum in Salem, MA.

Instagram: @valeriejhegarty
Web: valeriehegarty.com

Cut Me Up Issue 5: Envisioning Utopia was published on July 1, 2020.