To Hell With Dixie
01 - 29 Jul 2006
To Hell With Dixie
1 - 29 July 2006
Opening: 30 June 7 pm
What:
To Hell With Dixie , an exhibition of painting, drawing, photography and video by 11 artists, each addressing themes of historical memory and how the past influences the present in relation to place, focusing on the region of Memphis, Tennessee.
I am interested in stories half-told and mistakenly heard; the sort caught in snatches from the gabblers and whisperers across the room at empty bars on Wednesday afternoons, while the decent folk are still at work in office parks and city hall. The manner in which such narratives slowly seep into the back of the brain and inform a textured consciousness of one's geography is endlessly intriguing in my peripatetic observations. Imagistic flashbacks, spotty next day recollections of dirty rock n'roll bands playing loudly late at night, words written on napkins gleaned from weary waitresses wise beyond their place, all compose the sediment of physio-psychic geography by which we map our experiential terrain in a land apart from mainstream America--this third-world mercury puddle city-state in the heart of 'Henrietta', the Mecca of the Middle South--Memphis, Tennessee.
Neither surrealist nor folk, the work presented in the exhibition 'To Hell With Dixie,' occupies an idiosyncratic sensibility far removed from popular American culture. And yet it is still deeply American in its reflection of the nomadic characters and interstitial episodes that populate a bizarrely resonant visual world that could only be derived from an acute awareness of the societies occupying the American in-between. Collectively, the artists provide episodes of the ante-modern, tell tender truths, and spin blasphemous lies in alternate breaths to weave a mythic picture of a place in the gesamtkunstwerk mode of exhibition in which the line between fact and fiction becomes very faint indeed.
The resulting group of work possesses a sense of meandering rootless-ness combined with a deeply instinctual kinship with the locus of 'The South' in general, and the Memphis character in particular. Storytelling from the middle, To Hell With Dixie neglects the beginnings and endings in a manner that ensnares viewers with enduring imprints left from fleeting glances into a world beyond their own experience.
- text by John Weeden
Who:
Tommy Foster: This Must Be My Lucky Day , 2004, video. Foster transports a gaggle of plastic grocery store rocking horses in his pickup truck to a lake in the countryside where he sets them free on a secluded island. He says his goodbyes dressed in a powder blue country singer's outfit circa 1950's Nashville and a white straw cowboy hat. The parting shot of him motoring his bass boat into the sunset is idyllic, a bit campy and bittersweet. There is little spoken here. The action is simple, unexplained and unselfconscious. Foster's gangly and laconic Southern gentleman persona goes about the ritual performance without commentary or self-stated agenda. It is lyrically poetic.
Grier Edmundson: Grier is a student on the prestigious Glasgow (UK) MFA program in painting. He will be submitting 3 new figurative works for the show dealing with subjects familiar to his Memphis upbringing, but looking at them now through experiences in his family's ancestral homeland of Scotland, to which he'd never before been until beginning the MFA course.
Joel Hilgenberg: Joel is a painter with long experience operating the PUSH Gallery of San Francisco for 7 years before moving to Memphis in 2003. His current project, for which he'll be submitting a series of small paintings and drawings (post card to magazine cover range in size), depicts episodes of the bloody history of the Mississippi River of the American South of the early 19 th century, taken from old newspaper accounts of the era. Part underground tattooist, part sardonic social critic, Hilgenberg creates a world filled with mystery, and the occasional glimpse of madness. Working in an itinerant yet adroit style, the themes of death, love, courage, mayhem, and adventure manage to always exert themselves, whether the image is a fragmentary tale of cartoonish absurdity or an enigmatic epigram embracing the noir-ish mood of excerpted narrative. Pirates, outlaws, women of easy leisure, black-eyed boys and little girl amputees populate a community of the dangerous and the obscene.
Christian Patterson: is a photographer living in New York who has most recently worked as production assistant to William Eggleston. His work on Southern subjects portray a bizarre culture seemingly always on the brink of redemption or decay.
Ian Lemmonds: is a photographer in Memphis whose work focusing on second-hand stores and the presentation of discarded objects for re-sale discovers intimate articulations of treasures found amongst the trash.
Declan Clarke: is an Irish video artist living in London. His short film shot in Memphis in 2005 Bobby Buffaloe's Desoto , features an interviews with local barbecue cooks, and the antique car collector, Bobby Buffaloe to recount the history of Memphis, from the arrival of Spanish conquistador Hernando DeSoto to the present day.
Erin Abbott: is a photographer whose most recent work focuses on the phenomena of rural tornado shelters in the Mississippi countryside and the people who maintain them.
Brooke Ledbetter : documents the fast-disappearing country stores of Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi in the region around Memphis and the customers that keep them hanging on.
Scott Nurkin: is a muralist and musician living in North Carolina, who spent his university years in Memphis before studying painting in Italy. His work chronicles the life of the itinerant rock n'roll band The Dynamite Brothers.
Ben Nichols: is an artist from Little Rock, Arkansas, living in Memphis where he leads the band Lucero. His drawings of the small ghost town in Arkansas where his family originates depict the terrible deeds of the infamous 'Sherriff Pink', notorious for his brutal brand of law-giving in the pre-Civil Rights era Arkansas delta.
Tim Andrews: is a painter currently living in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where his subjects range from feral roosters and over-grown orchards, to self-portraits of intricate design patterning and color palette. For this exhibition he will be re-visiting the land of his childhood to compose images recounting the gothic episodes encountered in a small rural community by a boy with a boundless imagination inhibited by the hemophilia that kept him from playing with others.
jeanne Tyson: is a video artist who has recently graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis. Her work has ranged from experimental to documentary in style. This particular piece was filmed in the Memphis National Cemetery. It is home to over 40,000 buried U.S.soldiers, over 8,000 of which are unknown. Uniform, white headstones seem to stretch on forever. She was drawn to the space because of fear and curiosity. This piece was a way for her to confront this fear, and force herself to be in a place that was both frightening and attractive.
John Weeden is the curator of To Hell With Dixie . He received a BA in Art History at Rhodes College, Memphis, before curating exhibitions at Marshall Arts gallery, Memphis, from 1998-1999. He completed an MA in Contemporary Art at the Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, in 2000, after which he spent 2001-2003 in Dutchess County, New York state, pursuing another MA with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, for which a dissertation remains to be finished. Along the way he has held internships in London, Paris, and New York in the field of contemporary art as well as post-war art history and has worked in art institutions in Memphis and the UK. He has also curated (both individually and in groups) numerous freelance exhibitions, most notably And then there was the bad weather , 2000, London, and To What End? , Bard College, 2003, both of which featured works of contemporary video art. Among the museum catalogues to which he has contributed writing or production assistance are Les annees pop , Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001, and Highlights of the Brooks Museum , Memphis, 2004. John Weeden is currently the Director of the Lantana Projects artists' residency program, and the Assistant Director of the Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts (CODA) program at Rhodes College, Memphis.
The name 'America' is the feminine derivative of the early medieval Italian form of 'Henry' (Amerigo), effectively translating to 'Henrietta' in the English language. Amerigo Vespucci was the Italian explorer and mapmaker who gave the continent of America its name. Memphis, Tennessee, was known colloquially as the 'Mecca of the Mid-South' into the contemporary era due to the fact that large numbers of people from the surrounding agricultural region traveled there annually for trade and commerce, making the city a site of secular pilgrimage.
Gesamtkunstwerk is a German language term attributed to the opera composer Richard Wagner (b. Liepzig, 1813-1883) referring to an operatic performance which encompasses music, theater, and the visual arts, literally meaning "synthesis of the arts". Wagner placed great importance on "mood setting" elements, such as a darkened theater, sound effects, and seating arrangements which focused the attention of audience on the stage, completely immersing them in the imaginary world of the opera. These concepts were revolutionary at the time, but they have since come to be taken for granted in the modern operatic environment. For To Hell With Dixie , elements of video, graphic arts, lighting, and indigenous Memphis music contribute to a synaesthetic 'atmosphere' whereby the entire gallery acts as a participatory arena in which artwork, soundtrack and audience interact in a ritual of phenomenological experience.
© Tim Andrews
Dead Crows
2006
acrylic on paper (detal)
1 - 29 July 2006
Opening: 30 June 7 pm
What:
To Hell With Dixie , an exhibition of painting, drawing, photography and video by 11 artists, each addressing themes of historical memory and how the past influences the present in relation to place, focusing on the region of Memphis, Tennessee.
I am interested in stories half-told and mistakenly heard; the sort caught in snatches from the gabblers and whisperers across the room at empty bars on Wednesday afternoons, while the decent folk are still at work in office parks and city hall. The manner in which such narratives slowly seep into the back of the brain and inform a textured consciousness of one's geography is endlessly intriguing in my peripatetic observations. Imagistic flashbacks, spotty next day recollections of dirty rock n'roll bands playing loudly late at night, words written on napkins gleaned from weary waitresses wise beyond their place, all compose the sediment of physio-psychic geography by which we map our experiential terrain in a land apart from mainstream America--this third-world mercury puddle city-state in the heart of 'Henrietta', the Mecca of the Middle South--Memphis, Tennessee.
Neither surrealist nor folk, the work presented in the exhibition 'To Hell With Dixie,' occupies an idiosyncratic sensibility far removed from popular American culture. And yet it is still deeply American in its reflection of the nomadic characters and interstitial episodes that populate a bizarrely resonant visual world that could only be derived from an acute awareness of the societies occupying the American in-between. Collectively, the artists provide episodes of the ante-modern, tell tender truths, and spin blasphemous lies in alternate breaths to weave a mythic picture of a place in the gesamtkunstwerk mode of exhibition in which the line between fact and fiction becomes very faint indeed.
The resulting group of work possesses a sense of meandering rootless-ness combined with a deeply instinctual kinship with the locus of 'The South' in general, and the Memphis character in particular. Storytelling from the middle, To Hell With Dixie neglects the beginnings and endings in a manner that ensnares viewers with enduring imprints left from fleeting glances into a world beyond their own experience.
- text by John Weeden
Who:
Tommy Foster: This Must Be My Lucky Day , 2004, video. Foster transports a gaggle of plastic grocery store rocking horses in his pickup truck to a lake in the countryside where he sets them free on a secluded island. He says his goodbyes dressed in a powder blue country singer's outfit circa 1950's Nashville and a white straw cowboy hat. The parting shot of him motoring his bass boat into the sunset is idyllic, a bit campy and bittersweet. There is little spoken here. The action is simple, unexplained and unselfconscious. Foster's gangly and laconic Southern gentleman persona goes about the ritual performance without commentary or self-stated agenda. It is lyrically poetic.
Grier Edmundson: Grier is a student on the prestigious Glasgow (UK) MFA program in painting. He will be submitting 3 new figurative works for the show dealing with subjects familiar to his Memphis upbringing, but looking at them now through experiences in his family's ancestral homeland of Scotland, to which he'd never before been until beginning the MFA course.
Joel Hilgenberg: Joel is a painter with long experience operating the PUSH Gallery of San Francisco for 7 years before moving to Memphis in 2003. His current project, for which he'll be submitting a series of small paintings and drawings (post card to magazine cover range in size), depicts episodes of the bloody history of the Mississippi River of the American South of the early 19 th century, taken from old newspaper accounts of the era. Part underground tattooist, part sardonic social critic, Hilgenberg creates a world filled with mystery, and the occasional glimpse of madness. Working in an itinerant yet adroit style, the themes of death, love, courage, mayhem, and adventure manage to always exert themselves, whether the image is a fragmentary tale of cartoonish absurdity or an enigmatic epigram embracing the noir-ish mood of excerpted narrative. Pirates, outlaws, women of easy leisure, black-eyed boys and little girl amputees populate a community of the dangerous and the obscene.
Christian Patterson: is a photographer living in New York who has most recently worked as production assistant to William Eggleston. His work on Southern subjects portray a bizarre culture seemingly always on the brink of redemption or decay.
Ian Lemmonds: is a photographer in Memphis whose work focusing on second-hand stores and the presentation of discarded objects for re-sale discovers intimate articulations of treasures found amongst the trash.
Declan Clarke: is an Irish video artist living in London. His short film shot in Memphis in 2005 Bobby Buffaloe's Desoto , features an interviews with local barbecue cooks, and the antique car collector, Bobby Buffaloe to recount the history of Memphis, from the arrival of Spanish conquistador Hernando DeSoto to the present day.
Erin Abbott: is a photographer whose most recent work focuses on the phenomena of rural tornado shelters in the Mississippi countryside and the people who maintain them.
Brooke Ledbetter : documents the fast-disappearing country stores of Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi in the region around Memphis and the customers that keep them hanging on.
Scott Nurkin: is a muralist and musician living in North Carolina, who spent his university years in Memphis before studying painting in Italy. His work chronicles the life of the itinerant rock n'roll band The Dynamite Brothers.
Ben Nichols: is an artist from Little Rock, Arkansas, living in Memphis where he leads the band Lucero. His drawings of the small ghost town in Arkansas where his family originates depict the terrible deeds of the infamous 'Sherriff Pink', notorious for his brutal brand of law-giving in the pre-Civil Rights era Arkansas delta.
Tim Andrews: is a painter currently living in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where his subjects range from feral roosters and over-grown orchards, to self-portraits of intricate design patterning and color palette. For this exhibition he will be re-visiting the land of his childhood to compose images recounting the gothic episodes encountered in a small rural community by a boy with a boundless imagination inhibited by the hemophilia that kept him from playing with others.
jeanne Tyson: is a video artist who has recently graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis. Her work has ranged from experimental to documentary in style. This particular piece was filmed in the Memphis National Cemetery. It is home to over 40,000 buried U.S.soldiers, over 8,000 of which are unknown. Uniform, white headstones seem to stretch on forever. She was drawn to the space because of fear and curiosity. This piece was a way for her to confront this fear, and force herself to be in a place that was both frightening and attractive.
John Weeden is the curator of To Hell With Dixie . He received a BA in Art History at Rhodes College, Memphis, before curating exhibitions at Marshall Arts gallery, Memphis, from 1998-1999. He completed an MA in Contemporary Art at the Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, in 2000, after which he spent 2001-2003 in Dutchess County, New York state, pursuing another MA with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, for which a dissertation remains to be finished. Along the way he has held internships in London, Paris, and New York in the field of contemporary art as well as post-war art history and has worked in art institutions in Memphis and the UK. He has also curated (both individually and in groups) numerous freelance exhibitions, most notably And then there was the bad weather , 2000, London, and To What End? , Bard College, 2003, both of which featured works of contemporary video art. Among the museum catalogues to which he has contributed writing or production assistance are Les annees pop , Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001, and Highlights of the Brooks Museum , Memphis, 2004. John Weeden is currently the Director of the Lantana Projects artists' residency program, and the Assistant Director of the Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts (CODA) program at Rhodes College, Memphis.
The name 'America' is the feminine derivative of the early medieval Italian form of 'Henry' (Amerigo), effectively translating to 'Henrietta' in the English language. Amerigo Vespucci was the Italian explorer and mapmaker who gave the continent of America its name. Memphis, Tennessee, was known colloquially as the 'Mecca of the Mid-South' into the contemporary era due to the fact that large numbers of people from the surrounding agricultural region traveled there annually for trade and commerce, making the city a site of secular pilgrimage.
Gesamtkunstwerk is a German language term attributed to the opera composer Richard Wagner (b. Liepzig, 1813-1883) referring to an operatic performance which encompasses music, theater, and the visual arts, literally meaning "synthesis of the arts". Wagner placed great importance on "mood setting" elements, such as a darkened theater, sound effects, and seating arrangements which focused the attention of audience on the stage, completely immersing them in the imaginary world of the opera. These concepts were revolutionary at the time, but they have since come to be taken for granted in the modern operatic environment. For To Hell With Dixie , elements of video, graphic arts, lighting, and indigenous Memphis music contribute to a synaesthetic 'atmosphere' whereby the entire gallery acts as a participatory arena in which artwork, soundtrack and audience interact in a ritual of phenomenological experience.
© Tim Andrews
Dead Crows
2006
acrylic on paper (detal)