The Transplant show at Northwest Vista by Rebecca Drolen consisted
of a long hallway and several rooms lined with portraits of people positioned
in front of various foliage. Beside the portraits were photos of just foliage. These
portraits were fascinating in the way they portrayed landscape through
demographics. In her artist statement she talked about how each person was
someone who came to the South from somewhere else and how she has pinpointed
“Southern identity” as one of the main focal points of this work. Personally, I
was intrigued by the use of portrait as showing a sense of place instead of
person, or rather a group persona relating to place instead of an individual. Each
portrait and the people within them can be viewed as an individual, but in the
context of the whole work it ceases to be about the person in the picture. And
yet, at the same time those people are what the work is about, specifically
people who were transplanted into the South. This tug of war between the
individual in each portrait and the whole sense of place or group persona that
the entire work embodies is something that I would enjoy playing with in my own
work.
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