Southern Democratic is an exhibition of meditative vignettes, each featuring a specific body of work by an artist actively examining the changing world. The works are presented in dialogue with Election Eve, highlighting continued interest in concepts of place, life in the South, and uncanny imagery of the everyday.
Nearly 50 years later, the United States is on the precipice of another consequential presidential election, one that has the possibility to dramatically alter our collective futures across the region and beyond. It is the artists whose, often quiet, observations articulated through the lens of words, photographs, films, paintings, and sculpture succeed in truly seeing change––for better or for worse––as it is lived.
Not unlike Eggleston, artists Tag Christof, Casey Joiner, and Claudia Keep translate the quotidian; while Coulter Fussell, Y. Malik Jalal, and Polo Silk work in lineages of Southern craft to illuminate social cycles. John Chae and Carey Gough meditate on the past and future of Southern land, whereas Rose Marie Cromwell and Dawn DeDeaux focus specifically on environmental concerns. Albert Moser and Louis Zoellar Bickett work with taxonomies and repetition to illuminate and track; while Amy Pleasant’s figures provide relief and inherent potential, suggesting that our destinies are not fixed.
Curated by Phillip March Jones, Founder at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY and Owner of MARCH, New York, NY
Artists: Louis Zoellar Bickett, John Chae, Tag Christof, Rose Marie Cromwell, Dawn DeDeaux, William Eggleston, Carey Gough, Claudia Keep, Coulter Fussell, Y. Malik Jalal, Casey Joiner, Albert Moser, Amy Pleasant, Polo Silk, Viva Vadim
Southern Democratic is a Featured Project in the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: backstories. Now in its seventh iteration, the Biennial activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Northern Kentucky in October 2024—the largest of its kind in America. The backstories theme focuses on stories that are not evident at first glance. They offer context for what happened previously or out of view, providing narratives not yet told or presented from a new perspective. Once told, they shed light on current circumstances.
Image Credit: Tag Christof, Colonial Kitchen #6, 2019. Archival inkjet print, 17 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist
In October of 1976, William Eggleston went to Plains, Georgia on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine. Tasked with documenting the birthplace of Jimmy Carter, then the Democratic candidate for president, just weeks before the election, Eggleston used this project to further establish his uncompromising style: observational and democratic in nature, banal to the point of rigid and beautiful clarity.
The resulting images never appeared in the magazine but were later published as Election Eve, a collection of 100 original prints in two leather bound volumes, housed in a linen box and limited to five editions. Eggleston’s documentation of the South is decidedly and curiously devoid of people, but the images are nonetheless rich with evidence of life: quiet restaurants, abandoned bicycles, empty roads, and mailboxes anxiously awaiting human interaction. These photographs provide a personal and random catalog of a region that is increasingly unrecognizable, as the South continues to shift and change in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1976.
Phillip March Jones (b. 1981, Shreveport, LA) is an artist, writer, and curator based in New York City. In 2009, Jones founded Institute 193, a nonprofit contemporary art space and publisher in Lexington, Kentucky. He later served as the inaugural director of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, and as director of the Galerie Christian Berst (New York/Paris) and the Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. In 2020, Jones created MARCH, a gallery and public benefit corporation in Manhattan’s East Village that continues to operate. Jones’ writing has been published by the Jargon Society, Vanderbilt University Press, Dust-to-Digital, and Poem 88, among others.
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