What's lost is found in photo exhibit

For close to a decade, photographer Paul Shambroom has collected images of lost-pet posters.

We've all seen them. Stapled to telephone poles, tacked up in coffee shops, taped to fence posts: pleas for help finding lost pets.

"They are all so terribly sad," Shambroom said. "Each one has a story ingrained in it, and it's a story whose outcome for the most part we don't really know."

Often these posters have been smeared and baked by the weather.

"What happens is that any color separates into the component ink colors: cyan, yellow and magenta," said Shambroom. "Many of them have this rainbow aspect to them."

Shambroom's lost-pet project came to the attention of staff at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, now housed in the Pioneer Endicott building in downtown St. Paul. Executive Director Kristin Makholm had noticed that many residents of the building seemed to have dogs.

"Someday, I thought, it'd be fun to do something that connected with pets and animals," she said.

The lost-pet project, part of an exhibit titled "Lost," seemed a good fit.

The gallery at the Minnesota Museum of American Art is adorned with vibrantly colored details from the posters, many blown up to a huge size. There are lost dogs, cats, even birds. Often, the picture of the pet has faded to a ghostly outline, or isolated details: an eye, a nose, the outline of a paw or a tail. Also on the walls are snippets of text.

One is a plea from a bird owner asking for news, even if it's just that someone has found a pile of brightly colored feathers.

"The one we are looking at now says, 'A sound spooked him into taking off,'" said Shambroom. "Here's another one that says, 'She's quite shy and doesn't answer to her name.'"

They are phrases Shambroom pulled from posters. He thinks of them as found poetry.

"The language that people use to describe their pets, I think it's quite revealing about their relationship with the pet," he said. "They just have a resonance, kind of a glow to them as bits of poetry that I find really attractive."

A visitor builds a sense of gentle melancholy while going through the gallery. Even if you have never searched for a lost pet, it's easy to sense there are big things at stake here. Shambroom said loss is a universal emotion.

"It's something that everybody has to face at some point in their life," he continued. "I think there's a lot for people to connect with here, and it's a thing that doesn't get talked about a lot."

Even so, the next part of "Lost" can come as surprise. Around the corner from the lost pets are images from Shambroom's series called "Shrines: Public Weapons in America," which depicts decommissioned guns, tanks and even missiles used as war memorials. Again, the theme is loss; but Shambroom finds an uncomfortable edge.

"There is just something to me just so incongruent about using weapons as a way to memorialize the dead," he said.

The war-memorial pictures show the weapons in bucolic settings in small towns. They can be potent symbols of loss, particularly the ones from recent wars. A missile in a park in St. Bonifacious, Minn., gleams stark and white against a background of trees. Shambroom said older monuments blend in more.

"Over time, they sort of lose their fangs," he said. "They become more sculptural objects, or ... just a thing that's always been there."

The third element in "Lost" is called "Gloves," and deals with a sense of loss just about everyone in Minnesota has suffered. For years, Shambroom has almost compulsively shot pictures of dropped gloves he's come across in the street.

"There's actually a tradition in contemporary photography called typologies," he said. Many photographers return to the same subject again and again. For Shambroom, it's been gloves.

When he discovered that Albuquerque-based photographer Andy Mattern was doing the same thing, they combined their work to create a poignant display of unmoored hand wear.

Curator Christina Chang said Shambroom has cleverly combined disparate elements to explore the basic human reality of loss in a way that is accessible to just about everyone.

"What I think is really brilliant about the three projects and putting them in the same space is that you realize there are different scales of that feeling," she said.

And just so people don't get too sad, there is also a display of images taken from a website that celebrates the reunions of Minnesota pets and their owners.