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| Public Opinion Copyright JC Graham |
Memphis artist J.C. Graham will present a new body of work at Gallery Fifty Six in December, 2011. His show is titled ‘Sound Advice For the Parents of Unruly Children”. This exhibition is a continuance upon several themes that have remained predominant in the artist’s work for several years: rigid patriarchal familial structures, religious/spiritual expectations and the artist’s experiences with each during his upbringing in rural Arkansas.
JC Graham has relied heavily upon assemblage constructions for this particular exhibit and has done so because he finds that physical artifacts more fervently manifest an emotional response from the viewer when working in this particular genre -- you might call it the "I remember those" or "so and so had one of those" moments. The elements are reflections upon Graham’s childhood experience and rural farm life experienced therein -- he was primarily cared for by his paternal grandparents and in turn developed a general disassociation with his peer group. Youth, as it turned out, was not as entertaining for him as the aged Southern conflict that was his grandparent's resentful bond to one another.
JC Graham has embellished much of the work with Southern US Homonyms; words and phrases that were his internal dialogue: repeated in pattern and presenting dual meanings to the viewer, some merely colloquial and many referencing southern spirituals. JC’s creations are familiarity fertilized with subtle sociopolitical statements peppered with trite comedic undertones. In physical regards, the artist has remained true to the primitive and gritty perplexities that made up the small rural farm town: worn wood, aged metal, ephemera both religious and secular and graphical elements including numbers and geometric artifice. Each
piece houses what could be interpreted as a criticism and an endorsement of the ideas that plagued JC’s young mind as he tried to create an identity in a world of spiritual illusion and nonbinding religious doctrine that moved about among the characters in his family’s own novella.
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