WORSHAM: By the Grace of God
By the Grace of God
SUSAN WORSHAM
January 6 - February 18, 2017
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Over the past nine years, Susan Worsham has let curiosity and a sense of nostalgia guide her, traveling quiet roads, to warmly lit places, engaging with people she meets along the way. Her portraits illustrate collaborative reflections of fleeting moments shared between strangers. Images of backyards, shrouded by overgrowth, lush with vivid color are rich with a deeper truth. Dated facades, blanketed by dust, are each a chronicle of time’s passage. Worsham’s work often serves as metaphor for her own life experiences.
The artist writes, “These portraits represent a connecting point where two separate paths cross in the road and make something beautiful together that they could not have done without the other. For me these pictures become the proof of that moment and that beauty existed in it.”
Through brief encounters, Worsham rediscovers the rusting edges of her own southern childhood. The photographs delicately impart a sense of intimacy, and enigmatic symbolism. The experience of this exhibition will be inimitable, poetic and deeply personal, drawing inspiration in equal parts from the artist’s memories of family, from the southern landscape, and from the commingled confusion of sadness and beauty.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Susan Worsham (b. 1969) was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. Her photographs draw from her childhood experiences and are deeply personal and poetic. In her series Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane, Worsham takes on not only the grief of losing both of her parents, but more potently, she comes to terms with her brother’s suicide. In her later work, By the Grace of God, Worsham followed these same roads to take on the mysticism of the literary South, by entering the lives of the very real people who live there.
In 2009, Worsham was nominated for the Santa Fe Prize For Photography, and her book, Some Fox Trails In Virginia, and won first runner-up in the Fine Art category of the Blurb Photography Book Now International Competition. She was named one of Photo District News’ 30 Emerging Photographers to watch in 2011; in 2015, she received both a Lensculture Emerging Talent Award and a Lensculture Portrait Award; and a year later, was nominated for the 2016 Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer. She also received a grant from Kodak for her work. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans) and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA) hold Worsham's work.
