The Savannah that most visitors encounter is confined to the historic district between the Savannah River and the trees of Forsyth Park draped in Spanish moss. But several blocks south of the park, beyond the sun-dappled squares and canopied streets, is the increasingly vibrant Starland district. The neighborhood, whose name comes from the defunct Starland Dairy factory it surrounds, has in recent years emerged as an incubator for creativity that overflows from the nearby Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Now a clutch of new shops, galleries and cafes has taken root here, providing a refreshingly rough-around-the-edges respite from Savannahâ€s polished, Old South charm.

Here are the businesses/organizations that are briefly profiled in Ingrid K. Williams’ piece:

• Non-Fiction Gallery
• Graveface Records & Curiosities
• Art Rise Savannah
• Green Truck Pub
• Foxy Loxy

I don’t think I’ve ever devoted a full newspaper column to the work of Art Rise, but I have mentioned the nonprofit’s efforts here on Savannah Unplugged and I have written many times in the Savannah Morning News about Desotorow Gallery, which is now part of Art Rise. I’ve profiled all those other businesses over the years in City Talk columns.

This is obviously great coverage for the Thomas Square and Metropolitan neighborhoods, which Starland unofficially straddles. The stretch from Forsyth Park to Victory Drive has been much maligned over the years, but it really is a hub of fresh, local, creative activity.

I have to note, however, that most of us who actually live in the neighborhood would never say that Foxy Loxy, Non-Fiction, or Green Truck Pub are even  in Starland. Most of use the term Starland for the blocks immediately around the old Starland Dairy.

Look for more investment in the corridor. There are a number of available properties in the Bull Street corridor from Park to Victory, and the success of these efforts bodes well for others with similar visions of a vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood. The corridor is anchored at the north end by Forsyth Park and all the businesses in the American Legion complex and at the south end by the new One West Victory. There are other thriving businesses in between those places, of course, including Back in the Day Bakery.

As the neighborhood north of Forsyth Park becomes more expensive for commercial tenants and more heavily tilted toward tourism, the neighborhood south of the park will likely absorb a variety of commercial (and residential) tenants who are crowded out of the Historic District market.

Given the upside potential that still exists, it’s great to see that the neighborhood looks so promising to an outsider’s eyes.

By the way, the piece has a couple of lovely photos by Savannah-based Rich Burkhart.

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:

Non-Fiction Gallery (previously The Beast and Red Kite galleries, in addition to Little Beasts) has one of the purest spaces in town for art — high ceilings, good light, long walls. It’s not a huge space, just a really good one.

Here’s how the gallery describes itself:

“Home” by Adriane Herman

About Non-Fiction:
Non-Fiction is a new contemporary arts space located at 1522 Bull (formerly Little Beasts) dedicated to the support and evolution of Savannah’s emerging art scene. It is a multimedia exhibition space seeking to enrich and engage the community through innovative and experimental events and thereby cultivating an open political and cultural dialogue.

From the press release for “Open Book”:

The theme of Open Book is “Non-fiction” – work sourcing from and encapsulating themes of cultural history, research, publications, and/or documentation.