“Fragments And” An Installation of Work by Lynne Huffer
This exhibition, presented by The Bakery Atlanta, was on view September 17th, 2025 - October 5th, 2025 at The Supermarket
Photo by Blake Pipes
The Bakery Atlanta was thrilled to present Fragments And: An Installation of Work by Lynne Huffer in partnership with Emory’s Center for Ethics and Emory’s Ethics and the Arts Program on view Wednesday, September 17th through Sunday, October 5th at The Supermarket.
An opening reception was held on Wednesday, September 17th, from 6pm to 9pm. The reception featured a performance by movement artists Isa Newport and Graham Shelor. The event also coincided with The Bakery’s monthly collage night, a natural pairing considering the mediums and themes of the show.
Huffer’s gallery installation of fragments on zigzagging lines conceived as a living collage, invited viewers into an experimental, collaborative, immersive practice. Created as an installation for survival, Fragments And accompanied Huffer’s hybrid-style collage book, These Survivals: Autobiogr aphy of an Extinction, available for purchase at the exhibit. Fragments And displayed Huffer’s experiments in analog collage around the theme of extinction and the clash of intimate time with geological time.
When thinking of extinction, we fall into a sense of planetary time; the feeling that all is both individual and collective, inviting solitary practices amidst communal life. In that spirit, the exhibit invited its viewers to contribute to the installation by making their own fragments to add to the lines. The goal of this parallel play was to harness the childlike energy of analog collage, opening up new possibilities for self-reflection, friendship, and even solidarity.
In drawing on the aesthetic of fragmentation, Huffer attempted to push the limits of our perception and our thinking in a mode she calls “thought collage.” Huffer is especially interested in bringing attention to the substrate onto which a collage is pasted. She revels in the multiple meanings of substrate: paper, canvas, aluminum, cloth, wood, stone, brick, an old book to be altered, a notebook, the side of a building, the earth, or in this case, lines criss crossing an interior space. In working with substrates in our collaging practice, we also rework the ground of our thinking. Working with fragments allowed those who experience these installations for survival to access new ways of living in the face of ecological crisis, political turmoil, and an increasingly devastated planet.
Photo by Blake Pipes
On Sunday, September 21st, from 7pm to 8:30pm, The Supermarket hosted an evening of collage and a conversation between Huffer, Director of Ethics and the Arts, Laura Asherman, and David Haskell on writing and art in the face of extinction. Haskell is an interlocutor, biologist, writer, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of several books including The Forest Unseen, The Songs of Trees, Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree, and Sounds Wild and Broken. The audience was invited to make collaged fragments as they listen to the conversation.
Lynne Huffer is a philosopher, writer, teacher, collagist, and book artist interested in formal experimentation. She is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and the author of six books including most recently These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction (Duke University Press, 2025), an experimental, hybrid-style collage book composed of fragments of text and original artwork on the theme of mass species extinction. In addition to academic essays on feminism, queer theory, ethics, and the Anthropocene, she has published personal essays, creative nonfiction, and experimental writing. Her artwork is held by Bryn Mawr College special collections and the Center for the Book in New York. She regularly offers workshops and collaborative opportunities at universities, colleges, and community art venues. For more information about Huffer’s work, see her personal website thoughtcollage.net.
