Touching Ground Finding the American South; 20x24 Polaroids by Jennifer Trausch

Jan 13, 2013 - Mar 10, 2013 | Snite Museum of Art

Jennifer Trausch (American, b. 1977), Hunter, 2008, Polaroid. Collection of the artist.
Jennifer Trausch (American, b. 1977), Hunter, 2008, Polaroid. Collection of the artist.

O’Shaughnessy Galleries II and III
January 13–March 10, 2013

From 2006 to 2011, large-format photographer Jennifer Trausch took the refrigerator-sized 20 x 24 inch Polaroid camera from the predictable, comfortable confines of its studio home out onto the winding roads of the rural American South. Led from town to town by word of mouth, instinct, and caprice, Trausch worked steadily to understand some of the South’s essential truths through the strange moments she happened across in each small place: at fairs, auctions, dances, bars, and rodeos; in homes and shacks, open fields, swamps, forests, dirt roads and highways. The massive, beautiful contact-print images that Trausch made in these myriad places show a conflicted South: hopeful and menacing, at rest and crackling with life, defeated and defiant.

View the exhibition brochure, Touching Ground.