Description
The Original
Souvenir by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media collage on paper from the Albertine Series. I created this piece using antique postcards, found photography, handmade papers, and acrylic medium.
The piece measures 11×14″ (w/h) unframed. Shipping will be calculated based on location. Please note that colours and contrast vary between different monitors. The colours may not match your monitor’s display exactly. Additionally, copyright of my artwork does not transfer with purchase.
The Inspiration for Souvenir by Robin Rivers
Paris, the city of light, romance, wonder. At times, it may seem cliché. But, what of its magic? Its way of drawing one in and reconstructing how we perceive the world? Through the Albertine series, I wanted to explore how memory and time fragment, reconstructing themselves into spaces that live vividly in our experience, even when they are not a faithful representation of the original.
Souvenir explores The Belle Epoque era along Boulevard Montmartre with public domain elements and antique postcards from Paris, France. Each element is carefully chosen and cut to capture a moment when Henri discovers a gramophone shop where he buys one of the machines to play the song he and Albertine danced to over and over again.
Sources
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- Found post card, Boulevard Montmartre, anonymous, (late 19th century), acquired via secondary markets
- Orphaned photo of a woman, no date, acquired via secondary markets, public domain or presumed public domain based on age and publication status.
- Etching of peonies, (18th century) Century Library Archives (PD)
- Artist materials
- Handmade papers, handmade postcards, acrylic matte medium
How I source and care for historical materials → Sources
The Artist
Robin Rivers works across photography, collage, and text to recover the lives of women the historical record left out, overlooked, or misremembered—not as reconstruction, but as retrieval.
That work takes shape in the material each inquiry calls for: specific landscapes she photographs again and again, found photographs, writing, and archival fragments. The result sits deliberately between evidence and imagination: precise about sources while making room for intimacy, longing, and the gaps scholarship alone cannot fill.
Robin creates at Studio Albertine in Vancouver, Canada—on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples. This includes the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations
