Collector Story · First Edition

The Framing of El Camino

How collector Eliot Dam gave the first work in the retrospective its permanent home

By Jason Bennett Harris

When a one-of-a-kind artwork leaves the studio, the artist’s work is finished — but the collector’s has just begun. El Camino, the first piece in the 25-Year Retrospective and the first to enter a private collection, is built from more than eighty-five hand-cut photographic prints, layered and assembled without a single digital intervention. It is, by its nature, a fragile object: paper, emulsion, adhesive, and air. How it would be protected — and presented — mattered enormously.

Chicago art collector and car enthusiast Eliot Dam understood that from the start.

Rather than flattening the collage behind standard glazing, Eliot chose an elegant custom picture box — a deep, 3” inch wood shadow box finished in clean gallery white, fitted with museum-quality anti-reflective glass. It was the right decision on every count. The specialized glazing filters the UV light that fades photographic prints over decades, while its anti-reflective coating makes the glass all but disappear. Stand in front of the work and there is no glare to fight, no window between you and the piece — just the artwork itself, as present as it was on the studio table.

But the quiet brilliance of Eliot’s framing choice is in the depth — and the distance.

A photographic collage is not a photograph. It has topography — dozens of overlapping prints, each casting its own hairline shadow, each sitting a paper’s thickness above or below its neighbor. Press it flat behind glass, and that dimension dies. Eliot’s shadow box does the opposite. The artwork was mounted on a quarter-inch foam core backing and set against an eggshell mat that provides a full three to four inches of open space between the edge of the collage and the white wood frame.

That generous border is not empty — it is working. The distance gives the artwork room to command its own field, accentuating every irregular edge of the composition, while the raised mounting lifts the collage off the back of the frame and holds the glass well away from its surface. The result is that El Camino appears to float inside the box — suspended, weightless, with room to breathe.

The effect on the viewer is exactly what this work was made for. From across the room, your eye goes directly to the whole image: the sun-bleached Chevrolet at rest in the Tucson desert, the sky breaking into blue-grey panels above it. Then the floating depth pulls you closer. You begin to see the individual parts — the single frame that holds a chrome bumper, the seam where two skies meet, the shadow assembled from three different prints. The dimensionality that was built into the work by hand, print by print, is preserved and amplified. The frame doesn’t just protect the collage; it completes the experience of reading it.

There’s a nice symmetry in who made this choice. Eliot is a collector of art and a lover of automobiles — and El Camino is precisely where those two passions meet. He didn’t simply acquire the piece; he considered it, the way a car enthusiast considers what a great machine deserves. The framing session — moulding samples on the workbench, mat corners tested against the prints — was its own kind of collaboration.

A note on the practice: framing is always in addition to the purchase of the artwork, and it is anything but an afterthought. It exists to accentuate the work and complete it — a holistic presentation in which the piece and its habitat speak the same language. As an artist and a designer, I consider this alignment critical: the collage and the frame that houses it should feel inevitable together, each made better by the other. Eliot’s choices are a model of what that looks like.

The original El Camino now hangs in Eliot’s home in Chicago, floating in its white box, built to be looked at for a lifetime. Limited edition prints, in three sizes and affordable early collector pricing, opens August 1, 2026.

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