Southern Landscapes at MOCA Jacksonville

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida has recently opened a major group show of landscape photography made in the American South by a distinguished gathering of mostly Southern photographers.  

The show is entitled Southern Exposure:Portraits of a Changing Landscape and is up at MOCA Jacksonville through August 30th, 2015. 

Artists represented in this show include William Christenberry, Deborah Luster, Sally Mann, Jeanine Michna-Bales (see image above), Richard Misrach, Andrew Moore, and Alec Soth.

According to the folks at MOCA Jacksonville, the work on view in this show is intended to address several issues in the landscape photography of the American South.

They include the question of "timelessness" in depictions of the Southern landscape, the mental world where "moss-draped oaks create canopies over enormous columned mansions" and "lazy rivers wind through verdant shores teeming with wildlife."

But they also include the deeply time- and place-bound  questions of "the multifaceted relationship between man and land across time, from what remains in Civil War battlefields to roadsides and urban scenes to the ecological degradation studies along the iconic Mississippi River."

In any case, the folks at MOCA Jacksonville hope the images in the show "address the complex histories, extraordinary spirit, and unimaginable contradictions inherent in the American Southern landscape."

This all sounds exceptionally promising. well worth your visit if you are in Jacksonville, Florida this summer. 

Check it out and let me know how it works for you.