Gerald Mead's work is on view through April 22 at Insite Gallery, 810 Elmwood Avenue (884-9410). This piece is titled "NYC/FC."

For devotees of the meticulous art of collage and assemblage, it’s time to take magnifying glass in hand and head out to see “Small, Smaller & Smallest: Recent Work by Gerald Mead” at Insite Gallery, on view now through April 22nd.

The local audience will be familiar with Mead’s widely exhibited work in general, but this exhibition, in the appropriately intimate space of this new Elmwood Avenue gallery, features recent work in four different series: “Euroquad/Ameriquad,” “30 Square Inches Series,” “Chautauqua Series” and a group that one might call the “Monogram” series. The title lettering for the exhibition itself incorporates a found object—a magnifying glass—setting a tone that’s somewhat whimsical, but suggestive of investigation and scrutiny, encouraged by all of Mead’s work.

Each work in the “Euroquad/Ameriquad” series begins with a Kodak travel slide, that ubiquitous souvenir/document typically taken by vacationing dads everywhere. With no back illumination, the tourist destination or architectural icon in each slide is barely visible, but Mead explodes them with collaged bursts of ephemera from the road: map fragments, tickets, currency, brochures—the sort of stuff you might collect in the bottom of your suitcase. These collages, which radiate from the center of each slide, invoke the complex documentary and sentimental meaning packed into each tiny image. Each prepared slide, in turn, is mounted on a background with registration marks and blue lines, as if the entire work is ready to be photographed and thus preserved in another layer of intellectual “tourism.”

Relatively large by Meadian standards, the works in the “Monogram” series often incorporate rulers, frames and grids: tools and systems used to measure and contextualize images and objects. Again, our attention is drawn to the size of the materials assembled, and our search for meaning is shaped by considerations of scale and systems that transcend art and science. In three of these works—WC/JDM, ADC/OG and NYC/FC—human figures are layered with architectural stereographic cards, again invoking nostalgic documentation (in miniature) of landmarks visited, but also raising the historical dialogue between ideals of the human form and ideals of architecture—Mead’s contemporary take on da Vinci’s geometricized Vitruvian Man.

The more one contemplates these larger works, the more layers are revealed. ADC/OG, for example, links a triumphal arch (ADC= Arc de ?) with an image from Olympic competition (OG=Olympic Games), invoking the parallels between classical or neoclassical architecture and the classical physical competition of the Olympic games; the symmetrical perfection and balance required by each is underscored through their elegant layering. Just as the triumphal arch is symmetrical—and, for that matter, doubled by the stereographic format—the gymnast shown on the rings is bisected by a razor-thin line in the collage, that we may better inspect his superhuman display of strength and symmetry.

Three other works—H/SB, LF/LL and RRH/LS—take medical illustration glass slides, found collages in their own right, and layer them with resonant anatomical images, creating intimate yet jarring carnal vignettes. In each of the “Monogram” works, the austere decadence of the classical form and philosophy is subtly drawn out through juxtaposition which consistently succeeds in walking the fine line between iconographic obscurity and overt innuendo.

Mead created the eight works in the “30 Square Inches Series” by adopting and processing a collage artist’s windfall: several boxes of collage materials given by another artist who could not make use of them. These boxes were pre-organized by iconographic categories such as “men,” “flowers” and “Xmas.” Mead takes the wealth of material representing these categories and distills it into diminutive collages, each one inch square—the collage equivalent of a pocket dictionary entry. These tiny chunks of classification are each mounted on a small specimen clip, clamped in space to be scrutinized. One begins to notice how Mead often pins or clips his images and objects to their mounts like entomological specimens, suggesting life preserved, but in the manner of the 19th-century craze for collected curiosities.

The least iconographically loaded works in the exhibition, the collages of the “Chautauqua Series” reflect a summer’s visit to the nearby cultural community, while offering glimpses of the artist working in alternative formal approaches—strips, circles and basket weave. Here, form takes the lead, drawing substance from the rich, 19th-century tapestry of the surroundings at Chautauqua. Chautauqua, for example, literally weaves together images of the two main icons of Chautauqua: the Miller Bell Tower and the Athenaeum Hotel. It is as if Mead were applying his art to caning a chair on the veranda of the famed Victorian inn.

In all, Mead’s meticulous craftsmanship in integrating found objects and images in tightly woven compositions is compelling across various programmatic ventures. His virtuosic manipulation of the properties of gel medium and nearly imperceptible selective reductions of surface material lends exquisite texture to the intellectual layers always found in his work. Whether viewed through a looking glass or with the naked eye, Mead’s collages and assemblages are pleasures to decode—if not to dissect.