“You See Collage, I See Assemblage” at Arthaus featured the 2-D collages of William Hudders and the 3-D assemblages of Joseph M. Chapuk. Put together by curator Deborah Rabinsky, the community art space exhibition at 645 W. Hamilton St., Allentown, concluded Sept. 30.

The artists are professors at Northampton Community College.

Boldly-colored large works, including “Mosh-Pit Landscape” (2020; collage, mixed media with found images and acrylic paint on panel, 48 in. x 48 in.) made up most of Hudders’ part of the exhibit. The collection of images appear to rhythmically swirl around each other in a mist-like acrylic wash.

Not looking to create an “overriding meaning” with the artwork, the Easton-based artist says, “As I make them, they sort of start to generate a meaning of their own.”

Breaking from his color work, Hudders drew from his collection of black and white clippings when he created “Holiday” (2021; collage with found images, 9 in. x 16 in.). Among these are a movie shot of actress Catherine Deneuve, American flags, and vacation-like cut-out pictures arranged across a magazine photo of the Baltic Sea. “It’s kind of like doing a black and white drawing, just with black and white photographs,” Hudders relates.

Chapuk’s “Portrait of the Artist as an ’80s LA Punk * With His Mother” (2021, assemblage, mixed media with found objects, 24 in. x 24 in. x 3.75 in.) has a personal story behind it. Having created it for himself, Rabinsky convinced Chapuk to include it in the exhibit.

As an older art student working on his masters at California State University during the 1980s, he says, “All the other kids were ‘punks.’ If there was a party, that was the kind of music being played.” As an “ironic twist on my own life,” the artist added “with His Mother” to the title, “to make it sort of funny.”

The figurine of a seated, “mild-mannered” woman in a small cubby in shadow is contrasted to a roaring plastic tiger with white legs in an adjacent white-painted compartment. Chapuk says the tiger brings a more serious message about “environmental destruction” to the work. A bloody, upside-down, withered rose in another corner represents “putting lipstick on dead relationships.”

“Ironic contrasts” are a recurring theme in much of the Bethlehem-based artist’s work. Dead roses, Barbie dolls and male action figures trapped in stress positions, medicine bottles symbolizing Big Pharma among other things, and Mickey Mouse figurines as the benign faces of heartless corporations inhabit Chapuk’s intimate assemblages.

These elements occupy small shelves and compartments contained within wooden shadowboxes. A few are on stands, including a Barbie doll uncomfortably bent over backwards inside a clear-sided illuminated box, seemingly under the spell of Mickey Mouse from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

“No image is more or less important than the others in the composition,” Chapuk writes, “This may cause uncertainty in the viewer, which is, at least in part, the point …”

Hudders also had several paintings exhibited at the Arthaus Mezz Gallery inside the Allentown Renaissance Hotel, 12 N. Seventh St., Allentown.

Arthaus is a partnership between RE:find and the Allentown Arts Commission.

Arthaus, 645 W. Hamilton St., Allentown: 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. Tuesday - Saturday. Closed Sunday, Monday. www.allentownarts.com; 610-841-4866