Souvenirs From Paradise Exhibition

Excited to have 36 pieces from A Vanishing Folklore and The Changing Landscape of American Retail on display through January 6th at The Gallery at Mountain Shadows5445 E. Lincoln Drive,Paradise Valley, AZ 85253. ⁠

Curator Cece Cole:Jesse Rieser’s thematic works celebrate the often-overlooked in our day-to-day American experience. With the use of light and bleached color, Rieser constructs an illusionistic existence where the lines between fact and fiction are blurred.

For his exhibition Souvenirs From Paradise, Jesse intertwines divergent narratives to find meaning in the meaningless. The familiar becomes foreign in his examination of our rituals and the artifacts we leave behind. One-time paradisal places are framed by our modern anxieties about the past, present, and future. Intentionally omitted information evokes a sense of absence or loss and illuminates the surreal in our surroundings.

Jesse was born in the Ozarks and attended Arizona State University, where he majored in photography and art history while attending the Herberger Institute of Art and Design. His work has been profiled by The New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Wired, and NatGeo. He has been recognized by Communication Arts and AP Annual, and is a Critical Mass top 50 artist (awarded three times), a One Club Young Gun, a Magenta Foundation Flash Forward recipient, and a winning artist of the Klompching Gallery Fresh Award and exhibition.

A Vanishing Folklore 2012 - 2022These works are the transmissions of a citizen who seems comfortable sitting with the knowledge that he is as excited by his home as he is alarmed by it. The photographs are as much about the American roadside as they are the infinitely flat and delusional digital landscape, a place where reverence is arbitrarily distributed between the meaningful and meaningless components of our world, both existing and extinct.

If the earlier work of Christmas in America: Happy Birthday, Jesus is a thematic and a visual exercise in American Maximalism, these images are deceptively nuanced photographs of—and for—an America that has done everything it can to abolish nuance, creating bleached-out stand-ins for the place itself.

It’s hard to ignore the current collective fear of losing one’s version of America—their way of life, the fear that it too is fleeting. It’s as if their concept of America is un-shareable. You will find images of implied loss, or as if something is missing or been plucked out of the frame. Erased.

The Changing Landscape of American Retail 2015 - 2022Like memories, familiar retail entities are fading away. Today, they stand as modern-day ruins and architectural artifacts that reach into the not-so-distant past of our own maturing interests and evolving identities.

Toys “R” Us brings back of memories of avoiding my brother’s aerial assaults of red dodge balls and Nerf guns. The Battlefield Mall was once a central meeting spot for my junior high peers—anchored by the food court and Aladdin’s Castle arcade. The arcade elicits a sensory transaction when I’m greeted by the flashing lights of Street Fighter II, manic electronic beeps, purple geometric carpet, and the oddly unique odor of stale popcorn mixed with the metallic scent of quarters, tucked into my front pocket. During high school and college, I spent hours at Best Buy and Circuit City listening stations, previewing new music releases from my favorite artists.

By 2012, Circuit City closed their doors. Toys “R” Us folded in the spring of 2018, and Best Buy continues to shutter underperforming stores. Additionally, arcades and food courts are endangered as “Class B” malls are closing all over the U.S.

Store closings feel like a continuation of our declining thoughtful conversations, empty playgrounds, and sense of community as we opt for a digital facsimile. We are no longer previewing music and getting recommendations on new releases in person and in retail shops. We will no longer meet our friends in food courts.

The Changing Landscape of American Retail is an exercise of looking to the past and peering into the future, serving as a metaphor of how technology is accelerating cultural change in the modern world. I know you can’t fight change, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be sentimental.