Artist Research: William Christenberry

William Christenberry, a professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, has been a source of inspiration to my work for the past several years. I discovered his photography by accident one day while skimming through books at the library. I became intrigued with the way he captured images of remote Alabama service stations, churches and country stores. The abandoned houses and cars sitting on top of red Alabama clay in the middle of nowhere look so strange that it wouldn't be difficult to imagine them as miniatures or part of a set design. Many of the structures carry both personal and broader cultural meanings. Certain images, such as "House and Car, near Akron, Alabama" and "Palmist Building, Havana Junction, Alabama" are places that Christenberry revisits every summer. He has been re-photographing certain buildings for over twenty years and feels a sadness when he has returned to a place where changes have been made. I identify with the need to connect to a space and document it, especially one that I think may be gone soon, and also with the act of revisiting a place multiple times to see if and how it has been altered. There are houses near by Richmond that I have spent whole days exploring, setting up shots and rifling through the discarded objects of whoever was there before. These places are old friends to me, and I am outraged when I come back to find them gone. Visiting these spaces becomes a ritual, like going to church or to a cemetery. Initially the subject matter of Christenberry's work did resonate with me, but after learning of his process and reading his own thoughts about these places, I've decided that he's probably kind of crazy and really admire how this obsessiveness effects his art. Other photographs depict objects that serve as symbols for the rural American South. These images consist of gourd trees, bullet-riddled and rusted metal signs that have survived through the depression era and telephone posts being devoured by the invasive kudzu vine. A fence that is adorned with shotgun shells or barbed wire that has been decorated with hubcaps seem to signify what kind of life may exist beyond the frame. There is an eeriness about these symbols and their relationship with the land they exist on that transcends any "good old days" nostalgia that might typically be associated with such scenery. Although trained in college in the tradition of Abstract Expressionist painting, Christenberry rebelled with his own drawings, paintings and sculpture by introducing aspects of everyday reality into these works. The "Dream Building" series are miniature structures that the artist began to build after having a vision of them in his dreams. These sculptures are square, windowless and are usually adorned with tall white steeples reminiscent of the hoods worn by Klansman. Some of the buildings are ghostly and phantom like while others look as though they have been charred black by fire. Another series named "Southern Monuments" resemble platforms that often involve a ladder, a tree and gourds, however as with Christenberry's photography there are no human figures present. "For the most part, people are only sensed by their absence. We as viewers encounter all the traces of their onetime existence , but whatever they have left behind is only a ghostlike surrogate that entices us to intuit these vanished lives and souls." (Fox 188)