Artist talk with curator, Charles Guice and artists

Deborah Willis and Jessica Ingram

Saturday, July 19 at 11 a.m.

In light of the recent Jackson Fine Art show celebrating the Civil Rights Movement with photographer Bruce Davidson and paying honor to the critically acclaimed exhibitions at The High Museum - Road to Freedom and After 1968 - Jackson Fine Art continues to consider race and relationships in the upcoming show Four Women curated by Charles Guice, owner and curator of Charles Guice Contemporary in Oakland, California.

Asking the question - how has the dialogue about ethnicity, family, class, gender and sexuality changed in the last 50 years, Four Women showcases the work of Kianga Ford, Jessica Ingram, Carrie Mae Weems and Deborah Willis as it investigates their perspectives on the complex relationship between family and race - specifically its ongoing evolution in the South.

Kianga Ford works with sound and environment to question the psycho-physical dimensions of social identity formation. Her story-based installations engage the viewer in a participatory exploration of the limits between seemingly dialectical concepts such as individual and collective, intimate and public, given and contingent.

In her series A Civil Rights Memorial, Jessica Ingram recaptures the sites of more than 18 events that occurred during the 1960s and 70s, re-contextualizing a southern landscape that at one time represented a nation's fears, its hatred and its shame. Ingram’s images include sites like Pulaski, Tennessee where the Ku Klux Klan was founded; Money, Mississippi, where 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman and Jackson, Mississippi where an activist was gunned down outside his home.

Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has examined issues such as yearning, loss, cultural identity and power during her illustrious career, which has spanned more than 25 years. Her images, which are layered provide commentary on prejudice, but also challenge the conventions of photographic history, and how these norms have shaped American attitudes toward ethnicity, gender and identity.

For more than 30 years, Deborah Willis has pursued a dual career as a fine art photographer and a leading historian and curator. She has explored the role of photography and its impact on culture - in particular the role of the black image - and the extensive contributions made by African American photographers throughout the history of the medium. Her photographs embody collective memory and narrative.

The resulting dialogue between these four artists draws from the strength of the narrative; whether it is Ford's "Counting," an installation of 12 chalkboard pieces that outline the changing definition of race in the United States. Photographs of sites of Civil Rights era events swallowed into a southern landscape that comprise Ingram's compelling series "A Civil Rights Memorial," Gullah folk truths for safeguarding a home in Weems' "House" or the notions of pregnancy captured in Willis' "Mother Wit."

Four Women informs us that the definition of family fits within wide boundaries, that race is little more than a construct and that there is always another way of seeing. For truth lies within and outside the frame alike, and without considering both as a possible reality, we can never truly understand one another.