Hello! Intern Kellie here, to talk about what’s going on currently at CAL. Stuck!, a delightful show of collages made with stickers by Desireé Moore, is in the South Gallery until March 29. Every collage is bursting with colors, the reflective stickers literally making them shine in all their holographic rainbow glory.
Personally, the piece I am most drawn to is Octopus, where Moore has meticulously depicted an octopus with its limbs shifting between different vibrant color gradients. Comet also resonates with me. I especially enjoy how Moore cleverly uses celestial-shaped stickers to fit the subject matter’s theme. I can only imagine how tedious the placement of all these stickers must have been, but no one can deny that the result is absolutely mesmerizing!
With all this talk of stickers I became curious about how stickers came to be. As it turns out the concept of stickers is very old, tracing back to the ancient Egyptians who used an early version of them to mark good prices (Label Tech). The more modern version of stickers came with the use of stamps in the 1830s before stickers eventually came to be the symbols of personal expression we know today.
Experiencing Stuck! is like walking through playful childhood memories. While viewing each collage I was reminded of the I SPY books I used to look at, discovering little scenes I had missed before. This series also brought to mind my own relationship to stickers, my earliest memories being a sticker fiend as I stuck some to my grandmother’s washing machine all the way to how I use them today to decorate my laptop. Moore beautifully encapsulates how stickers are and can be used for self expression.
