The Revenant

The gaps between experience and history are filled with unauthorized cosmologies. Worldview. Origins of myth. While artifacts of war are found in pawnshops, artifacts of survival are found in cosmology. Through my work, I chart the southern imaginary—from the Culture Wars back to Reconstruction, from a Food Lion parking lot in Appalachia to the utopian plots of the Lower Ninth Ward—in search of cosmological artifacts.

This series of photographs dramatizes the narrative displacement of familiar pictures and text caused by drilling Bell Irvin Wiley’s Embattled Confederates: An Illustrated History of Southerners at War (Harper & Row, 1964). Like a failing dam, what began as one spontaneous hole gave way to a compulsive perforation. I drilled until the book was lace. Loosed from the pages that previously gave them context and gravity, historic images became dislocated and unrecognizable. The book’s unmaking betrayed it as something man-made, its narrative sovereignty jeopardized by an impolitic process.

The images perform and critique the southern gothic tradition of memorialization. They offer a reflection of how the Civil War feels to someone searching for its mark on the present, trying to square our experience of the South today with what we imagine about its past. Thus, this work addresses memory as a creative process, and questions the value—and the values—of history.

… a most disagreeable mirror, 2012

Righteous Wound, 2012

usoughtorewind, 2012

Undiscoverers, 2012

The gnawings of conscience, 2012

Rabble, 2012

Spine, 2012

Domeciled, 2012

To rend and redress, 2012

Nothin’ scarier than stupid ghosts, 2012