Kelly Combs
Theatre
Collage: “A Silent Reading,” 2008

In this riotous collage, Combs extracts the essence of Carroll’s enduring grip on popular consciousness. On the brightly colorful left side, she includes quotes from the Alice stories and other sources on the nature of curiosity; in contrast, the somber grey-tinged right side contains quotes on logic, mixed with the kinds of puzzles with which Carroll was so enamored. The two Alices at the bottom represent the viewer, who yearns to escape reality’s tether through the magic of imagination. The dodo bird overseeing it all is Carroll himself, who understood how crucial it is for one to know the rules of logic before one can break them.