Palimpseste – Mixed Media Collage on Wood

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 Albertine series, I wanted to explore how memory and time fragment, reconstructing themselves into spaces that live vividly in our experience, even when they are not a faithful representation of the original.

Through the social landscapes, I take single antique postcards from often-anonymous Parisian street photographers and build a narrative around them that explores not only the romance and longing of Albertine, but the wider social context of the eras from which the postcards emerged. This reimagining allows for a deeper sense of personal and societal remembering of the realities of Paris.

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

Notes on Care

Albertine is a love story at heart. I build each collage from public‑domain materials—primarily found pieces, Paris Musées archives and The Met Open Access—and note what’s known about dates and collections. While the work leans into romance, I set Henri and Albertine within the city’s real textures: its boulevards and bright nights, and the lives working behind the light. Where details are uncertain, I mark them as circa. My aim is to honor the past—its beauty and its blemishes—while inviting you into a story that feels intimate and true to its time.

The Artist

Robin Rivers is a multidisciplinary storyteller. She explores cultural memory keeping and technologies of circulation—how stories and images travel between people and across generations. Her practice folds writing and original photography into her mixed-media collage process. She examines how documented archives and personal interpretation shape our shared understanding of the past and how preservation itself is shaped by power, privilege, and historical upheaval. Robin creates all pieces 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.

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