Artist's Statement
In this body of work, I recontextualize historical images from Little Cottonwood Canyon and its surrounding areas, exploring the fragile intersections between landscape, memory, and time. These black-and-white photographs, many taken in the early to mid-twentieth century, document moments from Utah’s past, revealing glimpses into daily life amid a raw and changing frontier. I am drawn to these images not as static records, but as living fragments: evidence of lives once vivid, landscapes once untamed, and stories that persist even as they fade.
Through collage and sculptural paper forms, I reinterpret these archival photographs to explore how memory and history itself shift and reshape over time. Some images are layered into collages, where fragments interact to form new visual relationships. Others are transformed into sculptural works, where photographs are printed and drawn upon, folded and shaped like origami, allowing the image to take on physical presence and dimensionality. In these forms, the photograph becomes both subject and object, a memory folded into the material of its own telling.
In my collage work, I’m interested in decay, absence, and the passage of time. The folds, tears, and shadows created in the sculptural pieces mirror the distortions of memory and the instability of recollection. These works exist between documentation and imagination, between what was and what might have been. By manipulating these historical images, I seek to reveal the fluidity of memory and the ways in which we continuously reconstruct the past.
The project also contemplates the transformation of the Utah landscape itself. While the canyon has evolved, its mines exhausted, its wilderness mapped and developed, traces of its earlier character remain. The dialogue between permanence and change, wildness and settlement, echoes through both the images and the land they depict.
In reimagining these photographs, I invite viewers to consider not only what has been lost, but also what endures: the resilience of place, the persistence of memory, and the beauty that arises when fragments of history are unfolded into new forms.
Artist's Bio
Rebecca Pletsch is a Utah-based collage and mixed media artist whose work explores the fragmented, illusory nature of memory through found materials, archival imagery, and layered compositions. Over the past two decades, she has developed a distinctive visual language that investigates themes of loss, temporality, and transformation, elevating collage from craft to fine art while preserving its roots in personal history and collective memory.
Her work has been exhibited in every major museum and gallery throughout Utah, including the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the Southern Utah Museum of Art, Ogden Contemporary Arts, and the Kimball Art Center. Her work was also included in this year’s Utah Statewide Annual exhibition, and in 2024 she was selected as a Visiting Artist and Lecturer at Brigham Young University.
In addition to her studio practice, she collaborates with Ogden Contemporary Arts through their Artist Factory Program, developing and teaching advanced art workshops for underserved youth communities such as the Boys and Girls Club and Youth Impact of Ogden. Her educational work emphasizes creative experimentation and accessibility, encouraging students to explore the materials and visual languages that resonate most deeply with them.
