“Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,”
—Walter Benjamin.

Souvenirs for the End of the (last) Century

Souvenirs, was a search for clues and the materialization of a symptom all at once. It was an effort to wring out of the past its minute details in the hopes of redemption (for them? or for myself? I am not sure). The project was structured as three sets of kitsch-inspired memento-mori involving:

1. Edgar Degas
2. Robert Capa
3. Jacob Riis

Souvenirs recreated key works by each of these artists in the forms of dioramas, which were then photographed. The question it raised asked if it is possible to re-tool (in Brecht’s terms) the degraded but ubiquitous kitsch object, the souvenir, the memento, and transform it into a de-familiarizing device for social critique? In other words, is a “redemptive” moment possible within “low” culture that does not simply reduce it to irony or “camp”? And at the moment of redemption, is the previously scorned object given a new life, albeit as a sort of zombie? Souvenirs also alluded to the criminal’s proverbial return to the scene of the crime: a doubling-back that always precipitates the discovery of a missing “something” — a cuff-link, a weapon, or a lens cap. Like the ominous tapping of Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven what is found asserts that we have not yet settled our accounts with the dead. (1994-1996)