Description
The Original
Rencontre by Robin Rivers is an original piece of mixed media collage on wood from the Social Landscapes 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 Rencontre 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.
Rencontre is inspired by the boats and bridges along the Seine, along with the vintage Vue de Nuit postcards of the early 20th century. It reveals a moment when Henri is photographing the tower and is transported back to Pelleport’s poem about an encounter and the first night he and Albertine met. The piece examines that moment in Parisian history, between preserving the past and advancing into the modern era.
Sources
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- Paris Musées (CC Zero)
- Adolphe Pelleport poem, Rencontre (1865) (CC0)
- Exposition universelle de 1889. Ticket d’entrée, C. Richards (printer), (1889) (CC0)
- Postcard, Album de vues de Paris. La Seine, vue nocturne, Patras,(c.1920-30) (CC0)
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (public domain)
- Jean Berain, Partisan Carried by the Bodyguard of Louis XIV (1638–1715, reigned from 1643) (1679) (PD)
- Regiomontanus, Astrolabe made for Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472) (1462) (PD)
- Artist materials
- Handmade papers, vellum, gold acrylic paint, acrylic matte medium; licensed photography
- Paris Musées (CC Zero)
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.
