Description
The Original
Palimpseste by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media collage on wood from the Albertine Series. I created this piece using antique postcards, archival materials, found photography, handmade papers, and acrylic medium.
The piece measures 15×17″ (w/h) unframed and is mounted on wood. 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 Palimpseste 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 Social Landscapes series, I wanted to explore cultural memory keeping through the lens of romanticism. Each piece transforms single antique postcards from often-anonymous Parisian street photographers into complex narratives that stretch the boundaries of memory and time through the inclusion of archival photography, original photography shot by the artist, and layers of writing, handmade papers, and ephemera. Each piece begins with the romance of the city and expands into the broader social realities of Belle Époque Paris, incorporating archival materials and historical figures to explore how individual longing intersects with the cultural currents of the era.
Palimpseste is inspired by a Vue du Nuit postcard of the Moulin Rouge from the early 20th century. It speaks to a night when Henri sees the performer Otero exhausted on the streets of Montmartre after her performance and helps her back to the one-room apartment of her friend. The piece explores the feminine experience and how the public lives of performers during the Belle Epoque denied the reality of private feminine spaces. Set in Montmartre, c. 1890-1900—between the velvet glare of the Moulin Rouge and the private, precarious spaces of women’s lives.
Sources
- Paris Musées (CC Zero)
- Postcard, Paris la nuit – Paris by night – 22 – Montmartre – Le Moulin-Rouge- The Red Mill, Patras, (1929) (CC0)
- Postcard, Scènes de Paris – Devant le Moulin Rouge, anonymous, (c. 1900-1907) (CC0)
- Gustave Ferdinand Boberg, Rue de la Bonne, 1926 (1926) (CC0)
- Gustave Ferdinand Boberg, La rue Montmartre, 1926 (1926) (CC0)
- Otero (La Belle Otero), archival images and press references (c. 1890s–1900s) (CC0)
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (Public Domain)
- Image of French Corset (1887) (PD)
- Anne Vallayer-Coster, Three Peonies (1810) (PD)
- Found 19th century handwritten postcard of Montmartre
- Gallica (Licensed)
- Louise Farrenc, handwritten music scores (19th century)
- Artist materials
- Handmade papers, vellum, gold paint, 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.
