Collages
What is a souvenir? How do we change, sometimes romanticize, the “other” to fit our need to take with us, to own, a piece of an experience? In “Locket and Load”, large locket frames float, balance, or seem wedged above the grandeur of a canyon. Within an open locket, an endangered bison looks toward its companion, each isolated in a twin oval perched on the edge of the distant tree line. Below, Degas’ “Little Dancer of Fourteen Years” poses awkwardly erect and framed with her companion shadow. She faces an imposing rock formation that separates or possibly protects her from the largest pendant locket angled and wedged in the rocks. A diagonal light and shadow path connects her to the large eye gazing out at us. While the largest oval frames the emptiness of the distant landscape, it also supports this hanging miniature painting of a large blue eye with soft ringlet curls filling a simple gold circle pendant with spread golden wings. Seen by the memory of a “lover’s eye” and the authority or power of the “all-seeing eye”, we are positioned in the relationships between animal and land; human presence and artifact; and our capacity for experiencing awe even as we distance ourselves from being within it by gathering it in souvenirs. Who and what are possessed, endangered, or protected by our need to see and to own?