Creative Arts

Leah Gose

"Polaroid Collages"

Read more about the Polaroid Collages Exhibition at Amarillo College.

Questions of Stella

Leah Gose

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 storytelling 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.

Bio

Leah Gose is a photographic artist, educator, and Full Professor and Dean of the Fain College of Fine Arts at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, TX. She earned a B.A. in photography from the University of Colorado and an M.F.A. in photography from Texas Woman’s University. Her work seeks to challenge the viewer's relationship to their own perception and to question the reliability of memory. Her work has been exhibited in venues across the United States and internationally.