Blask (2026)

Blask is an original piece of mixed media photography on wood from the Retrieval series. Rivers created this piece using creative commons zero archival images from The Cleveland Museum of Art. Each element is hand cut and laid using analog collage techniques. Other elements include acrylic paint and medium. Through the Retrieval series, I work against the inherited iconography of medieval stained glass, recovering the feminine presence it was built to suppress. Each piece layers my own photography — shot across locations in France — with archival materials, returning the stained glass form to what it was shaped to obscure: women not as symbol or margin, but as origin. These are not reconstructions of a lost past. They are retrievals — what cultural memory would hold if it had never been severed from its source. Blask is the companion piece for Żar. Where Żar is fire, Blask is radiance.