Palimpsest Future

Vanessa Rivera, "Do I qualify?" (7 Oct 2005)

The collage that forms the focal point of this mailart card is created out of smsall bits of found text and image snipped out of magazines, scattered across a rough-hewn piece of corrugated cardboard (flaring at its edges), and taped in place with what appears to be packing tape. Much of this is reminiscent of the collage work of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, and, in this manner, Vanessa Rivera tells a story of worry: worry about getting into college, worry about paying for college, worry about the future that Fate intends for her.

This card becomes a whole with the addition of its other side. You cannot see it here, so you will have to imagine it. Vanessa has ripped a scrap out of a pulpy sheet of composition of that type used in primary grades to teach children how to write for the first time. This lined paper has three different types of lines, so as to help small children form their letters: a solid blue line at the top, a dotted green line below it, a solid red line below that, then a solid blue line at the bottom which becomes the top line of the next section. Bits of a youngster's writing practice are still visible on this sheet of paper, but they have been erased almost to nothingness. Vanessa appears to be recollecting her childhood, the point at which she first became a student, a bit before the plaint she has written on this scrap ("Do I qualify?") has ever occurred to her.

un violon d'ingres