Testaments and Revelations

Southerners are experts in past. We collect, honor, and relive the past. It is a testament all the native-borns have heard, continue to hear, and relay into the future. The stories are often fraught. They testify to alienation and singularity often with images seemingly benign but mired in undertones of violence and regret. Home is sacred, but while the home of our forbearers and childhoods may still be extant, it was possibly only a mythology in the first place. Contemporary Southerners know deep down that they cannot go home again. Most really do not want to go back, but ploughing a new field requires faith and strength.

“Testaments and Revelations” affirms Thomas Wolfe’s conundrum and presents beloved images of the Southern past but images that also question the path of the future. Ladders that lead up with no destination. Birds whose soaring is a symbol of freedom and joy, pictured trapped, caught, or dismembered. Ashleigh Coleman’s sensitive photographs of her “feral” children and their shared life with the land. Patrick Owens’ forgotten and forlorn but once useful objects assembled as records of time and place. Katelyn Chapman’s carefully rendered paintings of the substance of the shrinking rural South – fuzzy, ready-for-pie peaches timelessly confined to a box.

The curious imagery of “Testaments and Revelations” testifies to the fondness of memories but also confronts us with Wolfe’s revelation, “You can’t go home again.”

Fleming Markel, MFA Gallery Director
Greenville Technical College Greenville, SC