"NOLA Possum" by Magda Boreysza
New Orleans artist Magda Boreysza has described the realm of her work as a celebration of the "in between"—as writer Mimi Greenwood Knight puts it, "where day meets night, where reality meets fantasy, where waking hours meet dreamscape."
There is perhaps no better representative of the liminal than the opossum: a North American marsupial come to be a symbol of the South, a pacifist with a terrifying grin, simultaneously of the wild and of the suburbs, a creature who "plays with death," as it were. She is a spirit of the night, nocturnal, unless she becomes a mother—that primordial being of the in between, a portal of sorts, between this side and the other. When feeding babies, she might be seen scampering about on chainlink fences during the daytime hours, sleepless. Boreysza has said that the image of this smiling mother opossum, simultaneously heartwarming and unsettling, wandering out at dusk or at dawn, "is New Orleans" to her, in all its beautiful, strange ambiguity. It's the stuff that breeds myths, it's the stuff that breeds legends.
