Traditions Highway, stretches from north to south the entire length of Georgia, passing through Sparta and Athens, named after ancient Greek cities that gave birth to the concept of Democracy 2,500 years ago. To transplant these names onto the comparatively recent project of American Democracy, and the complex histories of the American South inevitably draws a line between the origin of our political system and its current local iterations. The works in this exhibition are a first-person window into our evolving experience of the American promise and an arena in which the ideal can coexist with everyday individual realities.
Irina Rozovsky’s photographs express how layers of past and present coalesce upon people, places, and objects—a discarded heart-shaped horse carriage abandoned in the woods, a hazy junkyard and the reflection in a rearview mirror, or a young girl standing next to a flooded forest, equalize moments of the mundane and the sublime. The photographs, printed at various sizes, also depict a tension between the natural and built environment, where the forms inherent to one mode begin to encroach upon the other. These images will be interspersed with a group of vernacular paintings collected by Rozovsky, depicting romantic rural vistas and picturesque landscapes.
Traditions Highway passes through old, forgotten towns. Rozovsky, who lives in Athens, Georgia, drove along this road, annotating any and all signage visible from the road—local political and commercial slogans, church marquees, traffic signs, and the chatter heard on local radio stations. These notes were then compiled as an automatic poem, printed in large scale, and wheat-pasted onto the central wall of the gallery—an excerpt reads:
do not pass / pass with care / the key to heaven was hung on a nail / promises made promises kept
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