Sign of the South



Meryl Truett’s South is a drive-by landscape of decrepit signage, from neon signs advertising greasy spoons and barbecue joints decorated with cartoon piggies to homemade signs proclaiming religious prophesy.

Truett’s South, as seen in her exhibition Thump Queen and Other Southern Anomalies at Barbara Archer Gallery, is more Carl Hiaasen than Tennessee Williams. Alternating between color images of Gatorland in Kissimmee, Fla., and more atmospheric black-and-white images taken in small towns from Virginia to Texas, Truett wavers between the one-note, unexceptional documentation of Southern eccentricity and a more interesting tangent that addresses the mysteries and menace of the place.

Truett maximizes her visual punch lines by framing her objects dead center and isolating them from the landscape, like the concrete “Big Skate” advertising a roller rink. We’re meant to chuckle, I imagine, at the homegrown advertising strategy, though the icon and the impulse are neither uniquely Southern nor even particularly noteworthy. Truett can indulge in a common tendency to serve up the South as comedic simply by virtue of its poverty or an inventiveness taken for incompetence.

But Truett may be at her best when she puts down the ain’t-it-rich eye goggles, and finds something darker down Dixie way.

Truett’s black-and-white images of cinderblock small-town businesses are especially intriguing, their bare bones facades proclaiming “Soul Palace” and “Last Time Around,” making it unclear whether patrons will find salvation or a good drunk within. Her photographs of crudely rendered signs evoke a sense that what lies beneath the homemade and absurd can be disturbing or at the very least weird. A handicraft white cross grave marker for “Bad Bob” comes embellished with a Confederate flag and “SS” insignia. And the forest itself seems to shriek apocalyptic paranoia of the Blair Witch variety in photographs of roadside placards that proclaim “Get Right with God,” “Repent! Final Warning” and the almost poignant, personal lament, “Why Jesus? Why You?”

It is in documenting such moments that Truett moves closest to the paradoxical heart of Southernness, where the innocent and earnest, menacing, rebellious and idiosyncratic coalesce.
-- Felicia Feaster

Thump Queen and Other Southern Anomalies runs through Dec. 4 at Barbara Archer Gallery, 280 Elizabeth St. Tues.-Fri., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 404-523-1845. www.barbaraarcher.com.