southern art

What makes art southern, exactly? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately… there’s certainly a tradition of outsider artists creating elaborate environments out of found materials, and of course quilts, and sewing, and embroidery... but I can’t really think of a “fine art” parallel to the southern literary movement. I’ve had to give a number of artist’s talks about my work lately, which has gotten me thinking about my visual background…. Growing up I spent a lot of time exploring abandoned buildings and houses- in the woods near my parent’s house there was a whole abandoned community of “freemen” houses built right after the civil war. In most of them the kudzu and the vines had taken over, leaving brick chimneys and sometimes even just vines in the shape of a house. There was also a more recently abandoned church camp, which had rows of beds, books, magazines- even clothes and shoes. It was eerie, as though the people had just left, and would be back momentarily. There were trenches, and tree stands and roadside shrines. Everything was always perpetually falling apart, splitting and being spliced back together.

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This reminds me of something I wrote awhile ago, about visiting Howard Finster’s house (above) in Georgia:

So instead you decide to lean back and imagine a porch where you can contemplate yourself as well as the wall across from you covered with leaves, recall the bicycle repairman turned painter who saw God’s face emerge from a splatter of grease and began building mirrored structures, houses, obelisks, coffins, cars, and still has not stopped. You can visit his house in Georgia, a sprawl of painted tires and ploughs and walkways, a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. All this set up in a yard almost overgrown by plants, as his carnival keeps expanding, flexing its mirrors, taking in the surrounding counties. You wonder what it takes to keep going like that, to continue building until the center point of the structure is lost, a snail’s shell of accumulating rooms, a hall of mirrors. It is the passion of collecting objects and turning them into something else, the idea of a house made of bottles and cement, fragile and perilous.