With information flowing so frighteningly free in the 21st century, fine-art collagists have infinitely more material available to parse and synthesize. At the same time, the task of originality is taller when the very act of cutting and pasting — the basic meaning of "collage," from the French coller, meaning "to glue or stick" — is as simple and quotidian as ctrl-C, ctrl-V. Nevertheless, many contemporary artists are rising to this omnivore's dilemma, creating new means to hack through the noise, or even emphasizing the noise itself.

For her exhibition By the Skin of Our Teeth , American artist Deborah Grant draws on a vast array of sources, encompassing broad concepts (the history of slavery, the Iraq War), the work of other artists (Bill Traylor, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jacob Lawrence), and personal considerations (her Barbadian heritage, her Hasidic neighbors). The show's centerpiece, In the Land of the Blind the Blue Eye Man Is King , is a fugue of brightly colored images — worn magazine cutouts mix with silhouetted top-hatted figures, scattered animals, and religious iconography in an interpretive free-for-all.

With less far-flung influences, Texas-bred Javier Piñón's collages tap into the symbolism of the Western frontier. In his show Don Quixote and other stories , Piñón recasts cowboys as mythical literary figures on whimsical manifest-destiny crusades; a rodeo rider sails across a photorealistic sea atop a heap of mismatched antique chairs in Odysseus . Chinese artist Hong Hao also creates uncanny juxtapositions with his hand-painted digital photographs. In Elegant Gathering at Nanping , a smattering of people wander through a classical Chinese landscape painting while a bevy of nude women bathe outdoors, undisturbed. Using cutout imagery, resin, sundry botanicals, and acrylic, Brooklyn-based artist Fred Tomaselli creates richly layered works, such as Migrant Fruit Thugs , in which two shimmering birds, created from tiny photographs of beaks, flowers, and eyes, perch in a fig tree while psychedelic starbursts glimmer through the branches.

New York-based Wangechi Mutu and Dutch artist Amie Dicke repurpose mixed media to disturbing figurative ends. Working in ink, acrylic, photocollage, and contact paper on Mylar, Mutu creates female (dis)figures that often appear to be constructed from toxic color bursts or glowing tumors, with tentacles and spatters of blood blooming from their heads, as if their terrible thoughts could not be contained. Dicke, on the other hand, is a poacher, hunting the elemental characteristics of female beauty. Working from magazine cutouts, she slowly shears away most of the model's identity until only a few accents (usually hair, lips, and hands) and an artfully carved network of dark, gooey seams remain.

Moving beyond actual collage to works that exploit the aesthetic, American kitsch master Jeff Koons and Spanish painter Jorge Galindo create surreal mashups that mimic collage techniques. In his Easy Fun-Ethereal series, Koons combines poolside vapidity with unglamorous '50s-ish images of food and a healthy interweaving of hair and wigs. Some works are even more disconnected, as with Bagel, which layers images of grass blades, a woman teasing her hair, and a smeared bagel with cutouts of a blue tank top and fishnet tights floating underneath. Strangely, if you relax your vision, the work echoes Georgia O'Keefe's iconic blooming flowers and steer skulls. In Galindo's Bodegón ornamental , a collection of odd elements encroach upon an opulent tabletop spread: an ashtray floats in the foreground, while a human hand protruding from a hen grasps a red inkpot, and another disembodied hand paints a woman's face scarlet.

-Jocelyn K. Glei