reviews > Normal, IL

Looking through Carla Winterbottom’s collages feels like weaving a gentle path through a marvelous flea market, the kind with boxes of enigmatic old photographs, albums of charming out-of-print wallpaper, tables strewn with feathers and doilies and random bits of this or that. To find objects of interest in a repository of the forgotten—be it a thrift store or junk shop, attic or dumpster—is a special skill that artists like André Breton and Kurt Schwitters had in spades. Carla Winterbottom partakes of it too, and of the equally vital ability to recombine those items into novel configurations of new worth. Not all of her artworks feel complete, but those that do read like odd and wistful poems without words.

—Lori Waxman 3/25/16 5:00 PM