©Leah Gose, They’ll forgive me one day

Leah Gose and I both had the pleasure to get portions of our photographic education in Denton Texas, me as an undergraduate at the University of North Texas, and Gose as a Graduate student at Texas Woman’s University. Over the years I’ve always enjoyed checking back in with photographers I’ve met while in school to see how their work has progressed, where are they living and/or teaching, etc. Gose’s recent work, Questions of Stella, resonates so much with me on a personal level. The project centers around the piecing together of someone’s identity through the relics of what they have left behind. In the case of Gose’s grandmother Stella, these relics take the form of postcards which Gose has collaged alongside Polaroids; attempting to complete the narrative that is so intrinsic to these objects.

Leah M. Gose is a visual artist specializing in photography and book arts.  She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Kendall College of Art & Design.  Leah holds a B.A. in photography from the University of Colorado – Boulder and an M.F.A. in photography from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas.  Her current work explores memory loss through re-contextualized personal memories and appropriated family photographs. Her work has been exhibited in various venues both nationally and internationally.

Questions of Stella

Very few items or memories of my great-grandmother Stella remain. Postcards are all that is left behind by a life lived. Just like impressions, the Polaroids and postcards serve to preserve or capture a moment. Both are truncated moments of time, a marker of something worth remembering or commenting on. When interlaced with the photographic imagery of the Polaroid, the constructed images take on new, dreamlike meanings with endless possibilities. I find that the quest to know my great-grandmother through these postcards has led to a greater understanding of her history with family and friends, who wrote to her. I can only assume that the image on the front of each postcard had a personal connection to the sender and somehow to Stella through the action of receiving it – the shared memory and experience of travel and story telling through a postcard. Many of those locations overlap places that I have found myself visiting and or living; a strange coincidence of lives lived decades apart. Her postcards and my photographs come together to recontextetualize memories of what remain both physically and metaphorically. I am left with questions rather than answers – generalizations rather than specifics. These dreamscapes are rooted in the details presented… sometimes revealing and yet often concealing.

©Leah Gose, All I’m saying is…

©Leah Gose, And you are not allowed to come

©Leah Gose, At some point this will sink in

©Leah Gose, Can we reccomend this comes from a certain place

©Leah Gose, I don’t think I should get into that right now.

©Leah Gose, I wish I laid eggs

©Leah Gose, There are a lot more possibilities I need to explore

©Leah Gose, This raises a huge problem

©Leah Gose, We are just dropping the ball right and left

©Leah Gose, We’ll run these by the 1 hr photo

©Leah Gose, Your request is extremely vague