But I’ve been immersed to varying degrees in O’Connor’s life and work for I guess about a decade now, maybe longer. I’m still on the board of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah (please like the Home on Facebook) and was president of the board for three years just after a major restoration of the museum house on Lafayette Square. My personal thanks to Linda Bruckheimer, Rena Patton, and others who were critical in making that restoration happen.

While I was president, we also hired our first — and still only — employee, launched the Ursrey Memorial Lecture Series (Alan Gurganus, Michael Cunningham, Jaimy Gordon, and Robert Olen Butler have appeared), and helped with the local launch of Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery, which was published by Little Brown.

And I’ve routinely taught O’Connor’s stories in my intro lit classes at Armstrong and presented a paper on criminality in her stories at a literary conference here a couple of years ago. I’ve given at least a couple of talks at the Childhood Home in the ongoing series of free Sunday lectures.

I was also involved a couple of years ago in launching Southern Discomfort, an exhibition and silent auction of works — almost all by Savannah area artists — inspired by Flannery O’Connor. I wrote about that first exhibit here, and Southern Discomfort 2 is now hanging at ThincSavannah at 35 Barnard St., just south of Ellis Square. The free reception and silent auction is Friday, Jan. 31 from 6 to 9 p.m. (silent auction ends at 8:30). Click here for the Facebook invitation.

I’ve worked on both Southern Discomfort shows with my Armstrong colleague Beth Howells, but the real work has been done by the artists. We’re offering all the invited artists a 50/50 split of the proceeds, by the way. That was something I insisted on from the very beginning; artists in Savannah are far too often asked to donate works in their entirety to nonprofit organizations, which can have the effect of devaluing the work.

But our offer to share the proceeds is only a small part of the reason that virtually everyone we ask decides to take part in the exhibit.

For many artists in this area, and around the world, O’Connor is a constant source of inspiration. Some find images in her short, intense life — her battle with lupus, the easy satire and irony of both her fiction and her early cartoons, the worlds of the farm and of the mind so fully chronicled in her letters, her love of peacocks and other fowl. Other artists turn to the stories themselves — the details of the hat in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, a particular line in “The River”, the eerie presence of the hogs in “Revelation”.

Still other artists consider their creations so influenced by O’Connor that they’ve submitted pieces that are part of ongoing bodies of work.

Have any of these dealings with O’Connor’s legacy brought me closer to O’Connor herself? I don’t know.

On the one hand, I’d have to say no. Given the complexities of her fiction and her mind, and the simple fact that she died before I was born, I can never be sure that I know anything about her definitively.

But part of me desires to say yes. And I find myself looking past the easy interpretations of her work that rely so heavily on the concept of grace. Increasingly, I find myself fascinated by some of the darkest elements in O’Connor’s fiction — the tension between spirituality and sexuality, the omnipresence of criminals and the looming threat of sexual violence, the abyss of nihilism that her characters are so often on verge of falling into.

Cheery stuff.

Of course, it is cheery stuff. There’s nothing that can brighten a day more than O’Connor’s incisive wit.

The works in Southern Discomfort 2 encompass all those elements. Here’s a sampling:

“Revelation” by Curtis Bartone:

“Habit of Being” by Jack Metcalf:

“Young Horse” by Marcus Kenney:

“The Meanest of Them Sparkled” by Christine Sajecki:

“Finding Flannery” by Katherine Sandoz:

“Seven dollar hat” by Melinda Borysevicz:

MLK was of course the old West Broad Street — the western border of downtown. The magnificent Union Station once stood a few blocks south of the SCAD MOA location, and the museum for years was housed entirely in old railway company offices in Kiah Hall. It was a nice space, but confining.

So some visiting artist friends who had already made several trips to Savannah were in town a couple of weeks ago. My old friend Kora had read something about Ursula von Rydingsvard’s massive sculptures on display at the museum, so we made that one of our stops during their short stay.

From the SCAD MOA website:

The SCAD Museum of Art presents a selection of cedar sculptures by artist Ursula von Rydingsvard. “Shadows Remain” consists of wall reliefs and monumental freestanding floor pieces that are at once abstract and referential, evoking forces of nature, anthropomorphic forms and utilitarian objects.

We also enjoyed “Rehearsals: The Practice and Influence of Sound and Movement”, which pairs various multimedia pieces with works from the Walter O. Evans Collection and “Reconstruction,” a site-specific painting by Adam Cvijanovic. From the museum website:

Deeply inspired by the museum as well as the history and landscapes of Savannah during his numerous trips to the area, Cvijanovic has created a surrealistic representation of an extruded “old Savannah” house.

Three partial landscapes—a cotton field, railroad tracks and the night sky—appear through the distorted rooms collectively combined and reconstructed into what the artist calls “a memory house.”

Other exhibitions included “Francisco Costa for Calvin Klein Collection” in the Andre Leon Talley Gallery and “Streaming Spirits” by Valerie Hammond and Kiki Smith.

Quite a nice mix of shows. Photography without flash is allowed at the SCAD Museum of Art, so I suppose it’s OK for me to post these to my blog . . .

Enjoy:

Cain will be selling the last of Connatser’s work from Cobitz’s private collection and also showcasing some of Cobitz’s prints, paintings, and drawings that Cain has stewarded since Joan’s 2005 death.

In email, Cain noted that all the works are being offered at “exceptional” prices.

When I moved to Savannah in 1995, I was Joan’s neighbor on East Gwinnett Street, but I didn’t see much of her those first months. Her longtime partner Larry Connatser was ill and dying. After his death in 1996, I saw a lot more of Joan and have many good memories of her, including the fascinating stories she told me of her life while I helped paint the edges of her living room ceiling. Sometime during this period, I first met Betsy as well.

When I bought my current house in late ’96, Joan gave me a housewarming gift: a particularly nice rock. I have it on the floor in the living room to this day.

I continued to see Joan regularly, especially in the early years of The Sentient Bean.

In 2002, Joan co-curated a retrospective of Larry’s work: sSouthern Melodies at the Telfair Museum of Art. Check out this 2002 feature piece in the Savannah Morning News. Click here to read Joan’s reflections on Larry’s work.

All the contact info is on the postcard embedded here (again, please note that the hours are from 9 a.m. till noon, not till midnight).

I’m sure I’ll be dropping by Cain’s studio one morning this weekend.

Those of us outside the SCAD community have a hard time keeping up with the various shows and venues — and I think many of those within that community have a hard time too.

So here are the key details about two shows about which I learned only after writing today’s column (my Do columns are typically finished by Monday morning).

The show “Syntax” will be at The Porch at 17 East 31st St. on May 10 and 11. The opening reception is Friday from 5 to 10 p.m. The Saturday hours are 12-5 p.m. The Porch is inside the college annex of Bull Street Baptist Church, between Bull and Drayton streets. Click here for the Facebook event page.

“Syntax” includes the work of six graduating SCAD seniors: Lomaho Colton Kretzmann, Justin Lee Harris, Shelby Suzanne Corbett, Carolyn Hepler-Smith, Casey Danielle Caulley, and Sunyong Kali Moon. I’m embedding images of both the postcard here and a lovely piece by Corbett.

by Shelby Corbett

Nearby at 125 West Duffy St., Sicky Nar Nar hosts a show by Tyler Giordano. From the Facebook event invitation:

Sicky Nar Nar is proud to present Tyler Giordano’s solo show, F I L E . // An accumulation of old collages and drawings combined with recent oil paintings that relate to a personal view of everyday life.

That event was just listed publicly on Facebook on Tuesday (too late for my Unplugged column today).

Click here for the Facebook event for “Into the Fold”, a photo show at S.P.A.C.E. that I did mention in today’s column.

According to the Stopover, online voting will account for 1/3 of the final decision, which will be announced during the kickoff event on Thursday evening in the North Garden at the Ships of the Sea.

I like all ten of the finalists, although I can’t help wonder what some of the other submissions looked like — there must have been some close runners-up.

But I’ll have to trust the impressive list of jurors involved in the selection: Marcus Kenney, Christine Sajecki, Ryan McCardle, Leslie Lovell, Paul Ringhoff, and Algar Thagne, in addition to Stopover staff.

Here are my personal top 3 from the finalists — posters for The Last Bison, Heyrocco, and Mac DeMarco — embedded here via the Facebook album:

Hair serves as a synecdoche for understanding the meaning of self and other, subject and object. The mimetic processes of hair modification separate and connect members of a culture; they are extensions of identity, an amalgamation of inheritance and formulation. The follicle and sebaceous glands generate hair as an inert by-product. It is dead but constantly growing. Once cut, shaved, or waxed from the body, it is disconnected but not entirely indistinct. When abjection occurs upon observing hair as an autonomous substance, it stems from an inability to assign ownership and our own personal conceptions of bodily entropy.

The processes of changing hair fiber have a long history, presumably beginning with the Egyptian use of synthetic hair extensions and henna to dye greying indications of maturity in the 34th century BCE. Lakota and Navajo children often played with dolls stuffed with chopped hair, and during the Victorian era, hair became a regular medium in producing wall hangings and jewelry. In more unfortunate circumstances, the Nazis used materials of the body, including skin and bones, to construct objects of daily life.

The artistic partnership, Adulio Pitaksalok, explores the functionality and representation of human hair by employing collected clippings from the floors of salons and homes. Using a felting technique of parting, rolling, picking, and stitching, Pitaksalok produces a matted wool-like fabric, bleached to a yellowish off-white. In the space, the bristly, thick textile is used as a conventional bed covering, an outer blanket. The pillows are also formed from the material, filled with loose, unprocessed hair, exposed and spilling out. A presentation against the gallery wall of different human hair samples with corresponding labels suggests formal cues of materiality as linked to phenotypical identity.

Pitaksalok examines processes of union and fusion. The bed and material are an exhibition of the abject but also of sleep and alchemy, of human bonding, the sensual and sexual. It is Duchampian in its staging of a functional reality but with a confounding surrealist undertone. We are connected by the ephemerality of experience, by our ability to grow and the common thread of hair.

I found the exhibit’s cultural references reached beyond even the scope of Akers’ description. There’s a kind of fetishistic creepiness in the harvesting and displaying of the 220 hair samples, and the descriptors selected by the donors in response to narrow categories of identity are themselves interesting comments on the labeling process so common in our culture.

So, here you go, some images from the exhibit:

Those of us who have followed Marcus Kenney‘s career for a long time know about his amazing eye with a camera. But most of Marcus’ work over the last decade has focused on his paintings, collages, and sculptural assemblages. Marcus has justifiably earned wide acclaim for that diverse body of work, which often incorporates and challenges societal norms of the South, of childhood, of race, of corporate structures, and on and on.

That’s not to say that Marcus’ art always has some sort of clear social or political meaning — I don’t want to reduce it in those ways.

His recent show Underneath the Hope at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta recently received a rave review in Art in America magazine. From that piece:

It almost seems wrong to say that Marcus Kenney draws heav­ily on his rural roots and Southern culture in his photographs, paintings and sculptures. The Louisiana native, now based in Savannah, Ga., offers work that is very much an extension of himself, not the product of an assumed esthetic meant to appeal to connoisseurs of the vernacular.

In his recent show “Underneath the Hope” (all works 2012), Kenney brewed a concoction of mystery and magic, but the air was not heavy with portent. His art is, in a word, fun. Yes, he touches on issues of race and politics, and he toys with taboos and transgressions, but his works are so exuberant and even-handed in their treatment that they don’t risk didacticism.

Kenney is a voracious consumer of materials and styles. Skulls are covered with sequins or bling. Tatty vintage taxi­dermy specimens are recycled into majestic otherworldly creatures. Ordinary items receive extraordinary adornments. Blithe dualism is the method of his alchemy.

“Underneath the Hope” was multimedia, but now Marcus Kenney the photographer has reasserted himself in a beautiful and provocative show — Fallen Animals — at SCAD’s Pinnacle Gallery at the corner of Habersham and Liberty here in Savannah.

I first discovered that Marcus was devoting significant time and energy to his photography a little over a year ago after he submitted a couple of pieces to an exhibition that I co-curated with Beth Howells in conjunction with the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home: “Southern Discomfort: Art Inspired by Flannery O’Connor”. You can read more about that show here A couple of months after that exhibit, Marcus was one of several participating artists who talked about O’Connor’s influence in a Sunday afternoon presentation at the Childhood Home. As a series of his stunning new photographs scrolled behind him, he discussed the influence of both O’Connor’s fiction and photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans.

From the official description of “Fallen Animals”:

“Fallen Animals” is a solo exhibition of black-and-white photographs by SCAD alumnus Marcus Kenney (M.F.A., photography, 1998). This exhibition offers haunting portraits and landscapes as well as repeated motifs such as masks, hands and religious iconography that recall a Southern Gothic style. Displayed collectively, the imagery evokes an ominous and poignant narrative that touches on the universal themes of innocence lost, the questioning of faith, and the vulnerability of life.

Widely acclaimed for his work in collage, painting and sculpture, Kenney has developed this striking body of images since 2011. “Fallen Animals” is the first exhibition to focus solely on his photography since 1998.

I was struck by many things on my first viewing of the photos: the complex emotions of the children in some of the photos — as if the viewer could somehow see into their futures; the sheer beauty of the sometimes scrubby landscapes; the constructedness of some of the images using masks and other objects to create bizarre and haunting juxtapositions that mirror some of his collage paintings; the persistent symbolism of innocence; the pleasing forms; the grounding in place. It’s a rich show, one I’m looking forward to viewing several more time.

I own a couple of Marcus’ photos from Mexico, including one that headlined a show many years ago at Gallery Espresso. It shows a dog caught in relative focus as it sprints behind a vehicle in which the photographer is riding. It’s an exhilarating image, with the dog relishing the risky, futile chase, and the blur of the grainy road surface creating sharp vertical lines.

“Fallen Animals” is installed with particular care and beauty, with the large print of “Parish Line” along the back wall facing the door, and most of the rest of the photos arranged in clusters on the western wall facing Habersham Street. Prices aren’t listed on the wall, but the limited editions of 15 begin at $1200.

Marcus Kenney’s “Fallen Animals” is presented as part of SCAD’s deFine Art 2013. A reception will be held at Pinnacle Gallery on Tuesday, Feb. 19, from 6:30-8 p.m.

A few images in the show that were with the press release:

Hard work. Dedication. Art. Fashion. Dance. Beauty. Energy. Youth. Sustainable reuse of castoff materials. Education. Public education.

Savannahians who appreciate any of those things need to do themselves a favor and plan to attend the 2014 Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show at the Savannah Arts Academy.

As I noted in a post last May, SAA was named the best public high school in Georgia by U.S. News & World Report. I’ve written posted fairly often about the school’s programs and events, including a recap of the Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show in 2011.

The 5th annual Junk 2 Funk packed the John A. Varnedoe Theater at the Savannah Arts Academy three times over the weekend for a multimedia extravaganza created from the combined work of students from a variety of the arts magnet’s programs.

You can learn a lot more at the SAA website and Facebook page. The school’s visual arts department, chaired by Trellis Payne, takes center stage for Junk 2 Funk, but many other departments are also involved. Savannah Magazine was a major sponsor this year.

The fast-paced show employed a theme of “The Seven Seas” and took the audience around the world. An opening dance number with a young tourist couple being accosted by fantasy figures moved seamlessly into the fashion show, which featured the work of 22 student designers who turned unconventional and found materials into clothes, which were modeled boldly by fellow students. As the runway show ended, the dancers returned, only to be followed by recognition of the designers, and then bows from the rest of the cast and crew.

I’ve limited this album to the best of the photographs I took. I wish I had gotten good shots of all the fashions and of all the participants, but I couldn’t and didn’t. I’ll post a bigger album to Facebook sometime in the coming days, but these were the shots that struck me. My apologies to the many students who aren’t pictured here.

And it’s likely pictures of others will turn up elsewhere. Click here for a piece in today’s Savannah Morning News that includes both photos and video. Mangue Banzima has already posted some great backstage photos on his Qui Style in Savannah blog. Photographer Christina M. Bunn has already posted some great shots too. If you see additional links of interest, please add them in the comments if I haven’t added them already.

And now what you were no doubt looking for, a few pics (click for larger versions or open the gallery using CoolIris):