It's collage season. Every elementary schooler in this part of the world has, at some point, picked up a fallen leaf and glued it to a piece of paper: voilà, a collage. But is glue really what holds collages together? That's one of the questions curator and artist David Powell investigates with "Collage/Uncollage" at the Phoenix in Waterbury (and in the related "Juxtaposition Show," concurrently at Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph). In addition to works by eight artists, Powell has compiled a gallery packet of writings on the topic. They include an essay by artist Todd Bartel, who posits the idea of "uncollage." Where collage is an accumulation of things glued together, "uncollage is seamless unison, but uncollage can also be an instigatory connection prompted by a readymade or a juxtaposition of any two things," he writes. The category is a bit too broad to be useful: By his definition, the only thing that's neither collage nor uncollage would be pure abstraction. The works in the show tell a different story. What's exciting about them — and what makes them collage even when they aren't glued — is the way they explore ruptures between ideas. They place things that don't make logical sense together in pictures that do make visual sense; the disjunction can be spooky, unnerving and wonderfully surprising. Leslie Fry's prints on aluminum don't seem like collage: At first glance, the viewer might suspect Photoshop. In reality, Fry stages paper cutouts and then photographs them, sometimes in real settings. In "Chthonic," a Renaissance face pokes out from underneath flowers in a compost pile. The cracks in the portrait's painted surface contrast with the photo clarity of eggshells and rotting leaves, creating a puzzling image. In "Leafscape," Fry combines a photo of a leaf with a snippet of painted feet to suggest a body resting on a distant, picturesque landscape. Though the image has very few separate elements, the leaf's deep, realistic shadow binds them together in an arresting composition. Similar art historical sources play into Jennifer Koch's assemblages, which take a more maximalist approach. In "Specimen #62 After Raphael," she brings together what was originally an early 16th-century diptych of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni with a large junk drawer's worth of studio detritus: spools of thread, bent pencils, doll parts, a very small ship in a bottle. Those items erupt from the couple's heads,…