Joe Roache’s Southern Exposure
I was one of the first few people to see the exhibit. On Thursday, Joe Roache came to Lemoyne for an artist’s reception. His collection, Southern Exposure, hung across the gallery, colorful memories were plastered across each canvas.
I took my time strolling from painting to painting, admiring the landscapes and portraits, each piece more vibrant than the last. Erykah Badu’s Didn’t Cha Know played in the background:
Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know,
Tried to move, but I lost my way
Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know,
Stopped to watch my emotions sway
The exhibit came full circle in the immersive art room. Projectors casted paintings onto the wall and, through some machination, made them move. Seeing as the event had only just begun, there was only one other person in the room, a woman with white-blond hair around my grandma’s age. With her hand to her chest, she looked around the room, transfixed. Without taking her eyes off the dancing portrait, There are the Things I Love, I heard her say “This reminds me of the light shows I used to go to as a teenager.”
I agreed. The projector lights enveloped the walls in a myriad of reds, blues, yellows, and greens. The lens singled in on the minutest of details, watching them flourish into the full-fledged painting.
“Oh, you wouldn’t know,” she said, finally turning to me. “This was before your time, back in the ’60s. What’s old is made new again.” And with that she turned from the room, I was alone.
I decided to take a second stroll through the gallery, this time, paying careful attention to the paintings I had quickly grown fond of, and more so to the ones I didn’t. Backyard in Spring, Akuaba in the Garden, The Magic Quilt. They all lulled me back into a collection of my own: A southern afternoon spent in my grandma’s backyard, not as it is now, but as it was when I was a child, where the sunflowers met the lake, and the strawberry planters were chewed through by squirrels.
Finding myself back in the immersive art room, I came upon a brother and sister, perhaps in their fifties or sixties. The sister turned to her brother, pointing at the painting projected on the wall and said “Do you remember the books we used to read as children? The way they’d change in the light…”
I watched as the pair marveled at the technology. Each of them wondering aloud, how do they do that?
This moved me—watching these older men and women stare, childlike, at immersive art walls. Growing up in the digital age, most of the art I’ve consumed has been electronic. But to them, this is a wonder. I thought of my brother and sisters. What will we say thirty, forty, fifty, years from now when we go to art exhibits? What childhood requiem will we recall as we marvel at the latest innovations?
I thought back to what the first woman said: What’s old is made new again.
It’s not just the lights, is it? It’s all of us.Through art we become children again, we become curious, nostalgic, and inspired by things we do not understand and maybe never will.
I went through the exhibit one final time. By this point, LeMoyne had started to crowd and I became aware of the space I was taking up. Somewhere across the room, I heard a different woman speaking with a group of people. She wasn’t saying anything of particular interest to me, but her thick southern accent caught my attention.
Thoughts of my own southern grandmas—their lives and art and diction—swirled in my mind. And when I tried to seek refuge in the immersive art room for the third time, there was none to be found. Directly across from the curtained doorway sat an elderly woman. She did not speak, but kept a slight smile, her dark eyes penetrated mine. I felt exposed. Like the lump in my throat and the ache in my chest for a long-ago afternoon washed all over me, just as Joe Roache’s painting casted upon me as I stepped through the projector’s path.
I left before he arrived.
When I got into the car, I began to cry. Real cries, real sobs. Looking down at my lap, I thumbed through the event pamphlet that had been stationed by the door. On the second to last page, I found a quote from Roache:
“Art is what makes people human to me, and it’s always been important. It’s important now because we really need to keep working at that humanity”.
So, I didn’t greet him at the reception, but I heard what he had to say. And, as I drove home, I think I really understood it.
