Courtesy of Southside Gallery
Southside Gallery is taking a walk on the wild side, presenting two solo exhibitions at the same time. From Sept. 13 to Oct. 1, Jerrod Partridge’s “Which Wert and Art” and Lucius Lamar’s “Fire Water Earth” will be on display.
The two shows are totally unrelated and represent separate, unique artistic expressions. However, Will Cook, a Southside Gallery curator, said Southside is fortunate to have Lamar and Partridge together.
“We lucked out,” Cook said. “Two amazing artists collided; it was serendipity.”
Courtesy of Southside Gallery
Lamar drew from “Trials of the Earth,” Mary Mann Hamilton’s account of settling the Mississippi Delta, for several reasons—including his relation to her by marriage. He considers the series an extension of an ongoing effort to familiarize the local area with Hamilton’s story.
“I’ve been working with ‘Trials’ for 20 years,” Lamar said. “We did the main book launch at “Thacker Mountain” with three readers and original music. We had a reading, we had music written and now visual art.”
“Fire Water Earth” attempts to bring artistic representation to the journey of Hamilton and her family as they settled an unknown land searching for a home.
“The show is more of a conceptualized narrative landscape for me, illustrative of the novel, hence the fire, water and earth scenes,” Lamar said.
The pieces themselves employ the bright, visceral colors that portray the elemental emotions and hardships Hamilton experienced. A vibrant red strip runs across all the paintings, providing the symbolic continuity of Hamilton’s journey and her descendants’ efforts to impart her story.
Courtesy of Southside Gallery
In the center of the exhibit sits a sculpture consisting of a tree stump raised high on a platform. Atop the stump is an old wooden chair occupied by a pair of muddy shoes. This sculpture symbolizes a seminal moment when Hamilton’s family had to leave their house in the middle of the night to find higher ground in the wake of a flood.
The paintings, titled with quotes from Hamilton’s book, essentially represent an effort to keep a piece of regional history vital and relevant.
“I wanted to give people another opportunity to experience a large part of our local history that could have easily been forgotten,” Lamar said. “She [Hamilton] finally found home. That was the trials of life, and she ultimately succeeded.”
Partridge, on the other hand, did not have a unifying narrative theme for the works he is displaying. In fact, he has excerpts from two distinct series on display. One half of the exhibit features works examining faces lit by computer screens, and the other half highlights the unexpected beauty of commonplace objects.
Courtesy of Southside Gallery
“What inspires [my] work is domestic things,” Partridge said. “Things that I observe in everyday life. Things that are not obviously beautiful. Watching people in a restaurant on their phones and seeing how the light shines on their faces.”
His works depicting ordinary objects are much larger than their counterparts and surrounded with symbolism. Partridge makes his own paper, leaving flaws in the material to help add character and expressive content to the works.
The screen-lit portraits are far more colorful and no less poignant than the larger works. Partridge’s subjects take on an almost ghostly aura as they contrast with their vivid backgrounds.
Despite these differences, both series have a similar purpose.
“Engagement with people is the goal,” Partridge said . “My job as an artist is to create experiences for people. What you hope is that you put together an exhibit that creates dialogue; it’s not just pretty pictures hanging on a wall.”
Lamar and Partridge already knew each other, and these concurrent displays have brought them together professionally with provocative results well worth a trip to the Square.
