“The roadside gas station began with the utilitarian function of providing fuel. Over time, it has evolved into a multifunctional hub that caters to a wide range of needs—service centers, convenience stores, restrooms, ATMs, and occasionally laundromats and showers. Despite their location, these stops share a surprisingly uniform design and cultural vocabulary.

Embedded within their functional purposes is a rich visual and material language: pop graphics, “Grab-n-Go” snack aisles, roller-grill hot dogs, and carefully curated souvenir displays. These items—snow globes, ashtrays, stuffed animals, and other keepsakes—transform the roadside stop into a site of memory-making. In doing so, they mark a shift: the traveler becomes a tourist, engaging in a performance of nostalgia and kitsch that renders the journey itself commemorative.

Souvenirs condense the essence of a place or experience into symbolic form. Over time, they can come to represent more than the events they were meant to mark—gaining symbolic autonomy. This process, where the part stands in for the whole, invests the souvenir with a fetishistic potential, amplified by the personal attachments of its collector. This emotional and highly personalized intensity is the hallmark of kitsch—an aesthetic in which feeling is enjoyed for its own sake, especially as it becomes detached from the object, which only serves as a theater of projections.

The term kitsch emerged in Munich in the mid-1800s to criticize certain forms of art deemed inauthentic, formulaic, or emotionally manipulative. Early accounts describe kitsch as a manufactured aesthetic experience—a substitute for "real" culture. As such, kitsch offers instant gratification, prioritizes surface over depth, and transforms the viewer from a critical participant into a passive consumer. Kitsch continues to be the site of a rich symbolic economy that people tend to overlook even though it makes up the air we breathe and the water we swim in as consumers living in the era of conspicuous consumption.”

-Steven Hampton