The Southern Memory

Buildings tell the stories of our lives. 

Frank Poor taps into the nerve endings of nostalgia, mystery and memories with his architectural sculpture. Walking into the art gallery where his one man show is installed at Davidson College (Davidson, North Carolina)  is like walking into a room filled with ghosts and skeletons, the remnants of humble structures .

Poor is a southerner, born into the agriculturally based tradition of a small town in Georgia. He left the south in 1990, earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1992 and stayed north for nearly twenty years. 

The south has a strong pull on its natives and like writers from the south, visual artists are usually gifted story tellers. Poor returned to Georgia and traveled across the blue highways of adjoining states to photographically document the fading architectural landscape - an assortment of decaying and falling-down barns, houses, churches. 

He printed his digital documentation onto transparencies. Then he built simple models of each building and “papered” the exterior wall, front and roofs with what look like negatives or x-rays. Most of the building/sculptures are roughly shoebox size and are attached to the walls of the all-white gallery.  Lighting from over head spots, slightly off-side, casts eerie shadows down the wall - explaining the show title: “Cast Shadows.”

The effect is instant and alarmingly visceral.  These places that once held everything important to multi-generations of people are now dying as we speak - abandoned by civilization that left them behind. Before much longer, weather and neglect will turn them into dust as surely as their former human occupants. 

(About thirty ago, I happened to walk into a major New York City museum where an entire room was filled with small detailed models documenting this similar slice of rural life. The artist was William Christenberry. I remember that experience in detail. I guess it combined the things closest to my heart: honest visual expression that tells a shared human story with incredible sensitivity, originality and a little humor.) 

Or maybe I just like small buildings.