Mike Cloud, “Leibovitz Orange #28,” 2008, Collage on paper. Courtesy of Bethel University Gallery

There’s a compelling exhibition, “Paper Quilts” by Brooklyn-based artist Mike Cloud, on view now at Bethel University’s Olson Gallery. The centerpieces of the show, three doubled-sided “paper quilts,” are surrounded by a series of smaller collage works, all of which are composed of deconstructed and repurposed photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

Mike Cloud, “Colin Powell Paper Quilt” (Back), 2010, altered photography book, Color-Aid paper and acrylic paint. Courtesy of the artist’s website

Specifically, Cloud’s quilts are made from hand-stitched leaves cut from Leibovitz’s coffee table book retrospective, “A Photographer’s Life.” He has affixed a mash-up of cut-out photo elements from the same book to that handmade patchwork, then thickly painted and conjoined the disparate images in groupings at once suggestive and mysterious.

Each quilt is titled for one of Leibovitz’s famous subjects, whose portraits appear prominently in their eponymous collages: “Bruce Springsteen,” “Colin Powell,” “Chuck Close.” Given that, one can’t help but look through the assemblages in the hopes of parsing some thematic throughline connecting the quilts’ mad variety of images. But if there’s a narrative threaded through Cloud’s placement and selection of photographic elements, it’s an oblique one.

Mike Cloud, “Leibovitz Orange #18,” 2008, Collage on paper. Courtesy of the artist’s website

In fact, the artist has purposefully abstracted the famous photographer’s shots: cutting and reassembling the pieces taken from them, obscuring (and binding) his chosen cut-out details with acrylic paint. For the larger paper quilts, he takes pains to excise the central subjects of her images – leaving holes, partially or completely transparent – in their places. As a result, his collage work feels at once familiar and alien, both contrived and raw.

The mark of the artist’s hand is unmistakable throughout: the diamond patterns painted on the “quilts” are rendered in muscular, rough-edged, but deliberate strokes of vivid color. He’s painted the name, “Annie Leibovitz,” in the quilts’ empty spaces. Each one hums with Cloud’s obsessive attention to the particulars of its conjunctions of color, texture and image. He’s clearly as concerned with the activity of painting itself – its aesthetics and materials, the history and labor of the practice – as he is the objective content of the resulting works.

Mike Cloud, “Leibovitz Orange #13,” 2008, Collage on paper. Courtesy of the artist’s website

That’s not to say these works are devoid of content. Indeed, Cloud’s collages offer a tantalizing daisy chain of culturally significant images; and yet, the ties binding them don’t read as the product of subjective, or particularly personal, concern. Rather, in his shift of focus from the individual to the abstract, Cloud seems to be after something more universally shared. And so, the granular details of Leibovitz’s instantly recognizable images – of pop icons, actors, politicians and artists – thus ambiguated into disembodied limbs, bundles of fabric, unnamed swaddled babies and cut-out, age-crinkled eyes become totems in Cloud’s richly textured shrine to line and flesh and living color.

“Paper Quilts: Mike Cloud” is on view September 11 through December 19 in the Olson Gallery at Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Dr., St. Paul.