Some ‘treasures’ from my collection, made of paper mache and acrylic paint, and here and there some wood. These things are real in the way that a character played by an actor in a play is real—both are pretend; both express something and, we hope, hold our attention.

The piece with the big, gold shell on top is a pretend, 18th Century French landscape. I work at a grocery store and made this piece out of a grape box. I cut the corners, pushed out the sides, and added the rest. The big landscape in the black frame ended up looking a lot like the landscapes near which I grew up, in Southwestern Wisconsin. I think of this as a painting by one of those 19th Century Americans who used three names, like Frederick Edwin Church or John Singer Sargent.

The piece with a natural wood frame is a Huguenot mirror. In times of persecution, French Protestants, or Huguenots, hid forbidden books in these mirrors. I made a French language Bible to go with my mirror. The Bible fits in the back of the mirror, behind a removable panel.

Centuries of candle soot obscure the face of a religious icon. There’s also a Japanese tea bowl, and four, quarter-size replicas that I made of sculptures by American artist and writer Anne Truitt. From the left, Morning Child (1973), Swannanoa (2002), A Wall for Apricots (1968), and Pith (1969). The Anne Truitt replicas aren’t old like the other pieces on this page, but they are part of my collection of art that is, in some way, removed from the real thing.