City Souvenirs is an ongoing collaboration between artists Liene Bosquê and Nicole Seisler, who met while pursuing MFA degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the course of the past two years, we have taken our mobile project to various neighborhoods in Chicago and New York City. All components of this work are designed to break down and fit into a suitcase and as such, our intention is to expand City Souvenirs to a global scale.
City Souvenirs blends Nicole and Liene’s interests in site-responsive work, the use of walking as a tool for art making, and the goal of creating tangible connections between people and place. Identifiable by our embroidered uniforms, hand-fabricated steel cart, and blocks of wet porcelain, we walk through neighborhoods in search of signature architectural details that visually and culturally define each place. By making direct impressions of these hallmarks in clay and inviting passersby to do the same, we build collections of objects that evidence the relationship between individuals and the urban landscape, and how the distinct elements of our environment influence the ways in which individuals operate and move through a city. The clay acts as a conduit to heighten an individual’s sensation of touch and physical connection to their surroundings, and the resulting impressions become records of particular moments between people and places. Installed in the gallery on hand-fabricated steel display systems, these fired porcelain objects become a map and archive of the character of each particular place.
