Press release:
Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present our inaugural exhibition, Representing Place: Photographs of Appalachia, an exhibition of photographs featuring work by Ken Abbott, Rob Amberg, William Christenberry, Walker Evans, Sarah Hoskins, William Gedney, Megan G. King, Builder Levy, O. Winston Link, Susan Lipper, Bertien van Manen, Tammy Mercure, Pamela Pecchio, Mike Smith, Doris Ulmann, and Bayard Wootten.
Conceived by Stacy Kranitz, the exhibition explores the complicated series of negotiations involved in representing place and how the photographer seeks to demystify stereotypes, sum up experience, and interpret memory and history through a variety of photographic strategies.
The Appalachian region of the United States has a deeply rooted relationship to the documentary tradition. Work by Doris Ulmann, Bayard Wootten, O. Winston Link, and Walker Evans formed narratives of a place with a unique rural identity. Eventually this led to a problematic trajectory of representations of poverty that were activated through the photograph. These representations played a central role in stereotyping the region as an unseemly place.
During the 1970s and 1980s, photographers such as William Gedney, Builder Levy, Susan Lipper, Rob Amberg, and Mike Smith immersed themselves deep within the terrain in an effort to demystify the tropes of poverty and offer a deeply felt acknowledgment of the region. They made substantial bodies of works by rooting themselves in the communities and forging relationships with their subjects which brings a kind of intimacy to the documentary tradition.
Emerging artists like Tammy Mercure, Ken Abbott, Megan King, and Sarah Hoskins have added to this legacy with diverse works that concern race and class and offer a broadening portrait of the region’s evolution.
Tracey Morgan Gallery is located in the South Slope area of Asheville, North Carolina. The gallery specializes in contemporary photography, works on paper, sculpture, and video by emerging and established artists from the United States and abroad. The secondary focus of the gallery is to promote the visual arts in the community by highlighting work created by regional artists or pertaining to Western North Carolina. Each year, the gallery will present a rotation of well-researched exhibitions by individual artists, as well as curated group shows that explore historical and contemporary themes.
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