Garrett Fuller

Artist Statement: I'm an artist, writer, and researcher who explores the relationship between language, image, and place. Photography is a component of my practice that forces me to get out of the studio. In my photos, I aim to highlight the semiotics of the U.S. South and address the ways in which the contemporary landscape requires us to consider nonlinear encounters with time and place. 

I draw on my experience growing up in Middle Tennessee and yearly visits to the small mill town where my grandmother grew up in Walhalla, South Carolina. My research at the Center for Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi allowed me to contextualize my personal experience within systems of culture, capital, and place. My interest in a sense of place led me to the Arkansas Delta and the North Mississippi Hill Country where several of these photos were created. 

In this selection of photos, I’ve attempted to relay the rhetorical power of the built rural landscape and allow for the seduction of language, both visual and literal, to play out through the framing and composition. These are complicated spaces—steeped in histories of exclusion, violence, and unequal access. However, in America, we are always occupying complex narrative landscapes, and the residue of history and capital leaves a tangled knot to contend with. My intention is not to be indulgent in the capture of romance, but instead, to offer a kernel that exposes the inherent precarity of romantic narratives about the Southern landscape.