Catalog Entry from If These Walls Could Talk Exhibit, Neill-Cochran House 2020:

This piece is rather snitty, if I do say so myself. It harkens back to memories of souvenirs gifted from well-meaning friends and family who had been on vacations to exotic and interesting places, places where I had not been, so the souvenirs made me jealous. Vintage postcards, with messages to Chlora on the back, accompany these objects. I found a treasure trove of old postcards in a neighbor’s junk pile and helped myself to imaginary travels of other people. I copied some of the postcards and put them with the trinkets. Other small objects surfaced in my natural surroundings: a bar tray from Cape Cod, a toy cannon my young son purchased at a Civil War battlefield, ubiquitous chocolate Mozart balls from his semester in Austria, and a dashboard hula girl. The one that always galled me the most was the replica of Christ of the Ozarks, posing Jesus as a souvenir, as a tourist attraction taking up massive air space in the gorgeous mountains where I grew up. “When firing the greenware trinkets for Other People’s Souvenirs, the little Civil War cannon blew up and took out the Jesus figure. There was no good technical reason for that explosion, except that Jesus deserved it. He was a replica of the stilted Christ of the Ozarks statue, a colossal example of what Greg Wolfe calls “piety attempting to substitute for quality.” The cannon and statuette were obliterated and had to be remade from scratch; it changed the story but it didn’t change the piece. This led to the inevitable question: Why porcelain?”