Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Olivia Parker uses a view camera to produce remarkable photographic collages. In the tradition of the great seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish still-life painters, she infuses everyday objects with a sense of mortality. This feeling is enhanced by her intriguing juxtaposition of elements in a shallow field and her split-toning process. Parker describes her choice of objects: “The objects I like, whether alive or dead, are signs of life. Memento mori on a tombstone says remember death, but it also reminds me that someone once lived.” In this image, she uses a small, broken classical sculpture (or its reproductive equivalent) to suggest a gap or interruption in time and space and, perhaps, a disjunction between a feminine ideal of the past and the liberated woman of the present.