Laura McPhee, “Mattie with a Bourbon Red Turkey, Lavery Ranch, Custer County, Idaho, November 2004” from the series “River of No Return,” chromogenic print, 37 9/16 x 30 1/8” (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, gift of the Hall Family Foundation, 2013.20.2. © 2024 Laura McPhee)
Large-scale photographs of rural subjects at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art emphasize the mystical specificity of American life
It seems unsurprising that in this first season of this first term of a new presidency, when drama and stakes are high — when so much of the tendency in conversation among “like-minded” people is to speculate on what goes through the heads of nonlike-minded people — that there would be an exhibit at an urban museum foregrounding the types of people that city-dwellers are most likely to lump into one politically outré class.
Now on view at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a new exhibit, “Strange and Familiar Places,” undermines stereotypical difference by instead emphasizing the almost mystical specificity of American life in a display of 26 large-scale photographs capturing rural subjects in the midst of their own, independent, fiercely realized worlds.
Rather than encapsulating a vast, monolithic “Rural America” unrolling from one end of so-called flyover country to the other, this exhibition makes us privy to the patchwork separateness that constitutes American life, in this case life in the rural Midwest, South, and Western U.S. Within this separateness, we witness an almost mystical self-cultivation and continuity with nature — or, if not with “Nature” itself, at least with the animals, plants and soil involved in the very human activities of farming, husbandry, hunting and ecological stewardship. Add to this a lived continuity with tradition as well — not only photographs containing folk imagery, but also those capturing the mythos of the rural subject, the subtle legends of who we are that Americans carry in their bodies.
For the most part, the photographers in this exhibit, curated by April Watson, senior curator of photography, shy away from groups of people. In a very American way, they’re interested in individuals and moments that reveal some truth about their lives. Laura McPhee’s “Mattie with a Bourbon Red Turkey, Lavery Ranch, Custer County, Idaho” is emblematic in this regard. The 13-year-old Mattie holds a dead turkey by the legs, hoisting its feet up to chest level as the massive bird hangs upside down, soft brown body feathers fluffed open by gravity, white wings fanned out and flecked with blood. Her almost expressionless face suggests matter-of-fact pride in her own ability. I can’t blame her. She just killed a turkey. It’s pitch-black night behind her. She’s wearing flip-flops. The wall text suggests that the wings make Mattie look like an angel. I don’t know if this is quite right, but she has certainly materialized on this museum wall holding death in her hands like some kind of messenger who, at the same time, feigns indifference.
In this individualistic vein, I think also of Bryan Schutmaat’s “Jimmy,” a gritty black-and-white photo of a desert drifter whom the photographer likens to “someone out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.” With that remark, Schutmaat makes clear enough that while these photos capture single moments in people’s lives, each life also participates in the web of texts and legends that form our American myths. Consider, too, Lara Shipley and Antone Dolezal’s photographs, which investigate the way that folkloric conceptions of the supernatural continue to evolve and play a role in people’s lives. It turns out that the legends are real after all — because we continue to realize them throughout our lives, whether by choice or circumstance. Taking this logic further, Kristine Potter attempts to reconfigure misogynistic folk traditions, like murder ballads, through posed photographs that both reference and subvert that violence.
We also glimpse many moments that hover on the knife’s edge between independence and isolation. RaMell Ross’ photograph “Yellow” shows a young girl in a yellow dress kneeling in front of a rosebush that half obscures her. She’s all alone, perhaps lost in her imagination — though there is something mournful in the composition and its slightly washed-out colors. In Elise Kirk’s “The Bather,” an older woman sits in a stock tank on the border between yard and forest. There are folding chairs on either side of her, but no one is sitting in them. In seeming contrast, Rahim Fortune’s photographs convey glimpses of rural Black communities and communal practices, whether in church or at the rodeo. Yet despite this collective context, there is a certain echoey loneliness to Fortune’s photos in their sumptuous shadows, not-quite-level camera angles and obscured backgrounds.
Perhaps the strangest photographs in “Strange and Familiar Places” depict striking relationships between humans and animals. I’m thinking, for instance, of Holly Lynton’s photo “Les, Honeybees, the Bosque, New Mexico,” which captures a beekeeper named Les who has brought two hands caked in living bees up to his face. We can see the blurring, glistening, brown-gold bodies of honeybees crawling over his tangled white beard, pooling again at his shoulders. Most strikingly, they gather in the deep shadows of his eyes. Les is frowning, or grimacing, or perhaps only sighing, with the suggestion of listening deeply. The wall text tells us that he refuses to wear protective gear so that he can more sensitively engage with the bees, and that it was his idea to perform this act. Doing so apparently produced a deafening buzz around his head. You can almost hear it yourself as you look at the photo. With a sort of saintliness, Les seems poised somewhere between ecstatic revelation and impending self-sacrifice — though he is also, perhaps, a bit of a dandy, his gesture revealing periwinkle cuff links that fasten the sleeves of his pale blue shirt. He stands in for the artist-mystic-naturalist, able to drive his hands into a swarm of bees at the same time that he guides our attention into more obscure folds of awareness.
Meanwhile, Terry Evans’ delicate composite photographs of prairie and grassland — one of the highlights of the exhibit — hold human-animal relationships at more of a distance. Looking closely, you can spot deer in the distance, or a frog tucked in the corner of a pond, within a landscape locked in continual negotiations with human agriculture and stewardship. As such practices change, over centuries or within years, so do the worlds of these animals. Evans’ images, made of roughly arranged squares culled from different photographs taken on different days, capture the feeling of passing time in an ecosystem that we must continually reconstruct in our minds if we are to understand it — a very pointedly human-made landscape.
In a different vein, Laura McPhee’s images of slaughtered animals work through a sort of posed frankness that reveals the deep structure of the worlds of those who do their own killing or do it for us. I think of a phrase from anglophone philosophy that’s often invoked to gesture at philosophy’s ultimate goal: “to carve nature at the joints.” The implied connection between butchering and reality finds its place in these photographs as well, where doing your own killing suggests something profound about your ability to face up to the facts of life, to get close to what life really is. People like Mattie, or the absent hunters in McPhee’s “Quartered Rocky Mountain Elk, Milky Creek, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho” or Lynton’s “Sienna, Turkey Madonna, Shutesbury, Massachusetts” — these people know something real about life, beyond the illusions of the digital. I think there is a certain strain of hard-edged American grit — an embodied mythology — that exactly intends to live in a timeless way that “carves nature at the joints.” Perhaps these Americans grant these artworks some of that truthful butchery by extension? Almost none of the photos in this exhibit depict digital technology — they could just as well be taken 50 years ago. The phones must be just outside the frame or tucked in back pockets.
As I wrote this, I was sitting in the Nelson’s upper atrium area next to the coffee shop Thou Mayest, observing what I can only describe as normal Midwestern high schoolers (they look about the same as any other high schoolers) pack into their bus after a field trip. I watched others come and go from the museum. I feel that, compared to the big coastal cities, there is less of a distinction between town and country here in Kansas City. How are all these visitors like or unlike the people in these photos? How am I? In some moods, I could tell you exactly how. In others, I’m not so sure. How do we fit these isolated, weirdly luminous moments, like a bare back swarmed by mayflies, the births of twin cows followed by the births of twin humans, prize bread molding at a state fair, or a caged rabbit under a plastic swan, into easy schemata of difference in America? “Strange and Familiar Places” tells us that America is a big place, but that the many individual worlds that compose it are small, and their vastness lies within.
One might read into this exhibit a certain post-political thrust — though there is no desire here to envision a deeper monism of common cause, where the material conditions of life in the vast interior of this American empire would create a union of the many against the plunder of the rich. That seems to be forever beyond us.
In Lara Shipley’s photo “Jeannie’s Art,” the titular Jeannie poses in a knit mask she has made as a portrait of her husband. It’s vaguely unnerving to me, like an image of a possession, or summoning, or incarnation of an otherworldly being, as if a still from a horror movie. The face as article of clothing. I’ve found myself continuing to think about the knit mask, made for others and of others, a way of representing those others’ othernesses while disavowing any pretensions towards realism. The mask suggests the alienation of the face, of skin, of identity, a mobile core of existence below all that, which knits appearances and tries on other lives. A way of allowing oneself to relate to anyone else by foregrounding the unique strangeness within each of us. A knit photography. A means of stitching all these moments together.
“Strange and Familiar Places” continues at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak St., through July 20. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday through Monday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Admission is free. For more information, 816.751.1278 or www.nelson-atkins.org.
