The Carnegie, Covington, KY.

FotoFocus Biennial

SEPTEMBER 26, 2024 – FEBRUARY 15, 2025

In October 1976, William Eggleston left his home in Memphis, Tennessee and drove to Plains, Georgia on assignment for Rolling Stone Magazine, tasked with documenting the birthplace of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate for President, just weeks before the election. The resulting images never appeared in the magazine, but the New York publisher Caldecot Chubb soon produced Election Eve, a collection of one hundred original prints in two leather-bound volumes, housed in a linen box and limited to five copies.

Nearly fifty 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. We all have roles to play, but it is the artists whose often quiet observations articulated through the lens of words, photographs, film, painting, and sculpture succeed in truly seeing change—for better or for worse— as it is lived.

Southern Democratic is an exhibition comprised of meditative vignettes, each featuring a specific body of work by an artist who is actively examining this changing world, presented here in silent dialogue with Eggleston’s Election Eve. Not unlike Eggleston, Tag Christof, Casey Joiner, Claudia Keep, and Viva Vadim 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 and our ever-threatened environment is the chief concern of Rose Marie Cromwell and Dawn DeDeaux. Albert Moser and Louis Zoellar Bickett work with taxonomies, creating distinct series of images that use repetition to illuminate and track while Amy Pleasant’s figures provide relief and inherent potential, contour renderings of the human form suggesting that our destinies are not fixed.

Curator: 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