lay us down
JUdson Womack
“In these images, I ask what it means as a white man, to live, die, and be buried in ground so imbued with suffering that it cracks our walls and poisons our water”
Artist Statement
Lay Us Down, 2024
“In these images, I ask what it means as a white
man, to live, die, and be buried in ground so imbued with suffering that it
cracks our walls and poisons our water”
Lay Us Down is a photographic series located in my home state of Mississippi; my meditations on a place struggling to realize the promises of modern society against an incompatible fantasy of Southern values and heritage. Invoking the Southern Gothic, these images reflect my understanding of a land debased first by colonialism and chattel slavery, and then by the absolute refusal to atone for it, even in the face of defeat. Further discontented, my relationship with Mississippi is as an ambitious son who left to become more; drawn back by family obligation, a fundamental sense of belonging, and a cemetery plot in Hinds County that already bears my name. Lay Us Down exists in its current form as a handmade, case-bound book with embossed covers containing 40 images on 96 pages.
The Gallery
About Artist
Judson Womack (he/him) is a Chicago-based photographer exploring themes of toxic traditionalism, ritual, and inherited culture in America’s privileged spaces, including his own. His bodies of work join meditative documentary-style images and archival material to examine the cyclical nature with which place and memory form identity, with which identity then forms place and memory, and so on and so forth. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, he received his BFA in Studio Art from Davidson College in 2018 and is expected to receive his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2025.
judsonawomack@gmail.com
Instagram: judwomack