Christy Bush, Tabitha Soren find familiarity and relief with new Laney Contemporary show

Laney Contemporary Gallery Director Susan Laney cut her curatorial teeth on photography. Many who have followed the Savannah art scene over the last decade plus will no doubt recall photo shows she curated at SCAD Museum of Art, like Jack Leigh: Full Circle, Low Country Photographs, 1972-2004 back in 2014, an exhibition by Kevin Cooley, and a collaboration with the photography-minded curators over at Ain’t Bad.

Other than bringing those folks back to her own gallery, however, she’s since mostly stuck to exhibiting work by artists creating in other media.

That’s about to change.

Laney grew up practicing photography herself, and one of her favorite galleries to visit as a young woman was Jackson Fine Art. Now through March 31, she’ll be exhibiting two shows that debuted at the Atlanta-based gallery, a full-circle moment for the curator.

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Christy Bush - Familiar

Photographer Christy Bush has spent the last 30 years refining her craft, building a reputation as a commercial photographer with a unique vision. With her exhibition “Familiar” and the accompanying book of the same name, she’s finally opening up the artistic side of her portfolio, one which she’s held beneath the surface since she began shooting at age 15.

“I have boxes and boxes and boxes of pictures and negatives [from] before things went digital, and I have hard drives and hard drives and hard drives from when everything switched over,” she noted. “So, for me, one of the benefits of the lockdown was I kind of did what a lot of people were doing and started trying to take that time to organize things.”

As Bush was going through those countless boxes and hard drives, she found that she kept coming back to a collection of specific photographs, what she called “go-to images.” As a way to connect with folks during the isolating early days of the pandemic, she ended up taking pics of some of those images with her phone and texting them out to friends, many of whom were featured in the photos. In response, she was often asked, ‘When are you going to do a book?’

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As the world began to open up again, she was having dinner with a group of her closest girlfriends, a group affectionately known amongst each other as “the babes,” when the topic turned once again to the pics that she’d been digging through over the past several months.

“One of them said, ‘Well, what is it that you want? Let’s manifest it.’ And I said, ‘I would like to be shown at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, and I’d like to publish a book, but I don’t know what the book looks like.’”

Her friend responded simply with, “This is so easy.”

Within a couple of weeks, that friend had connected Bush with Bitter Southerner’s co-founder and Media and Communications Director Kyle Tibbs Jones. By the end of the meeting, Jones said that she wanted to do a publication of Bush’s work from the last 30 years, the biggest project of its kind that the magazine had ever done.

“And that was it,” she recalled with a chuckle, as simple as one of her “babes” had predicted.

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The book and accompanying exhibition feature documentary imagery with a decidedly participatory feel. Starting in the early 1990s when Bush moved to Athens and began shooting her friends, including legendary REM lead singer Michael Stipe (who wrote the forward to the book), and continuing into the present, the pieces bridge the gap between an off-the-cuff, in-the-moment style and the techniques she’s developed over the years as an editorial and commercial photographer. The results are accessible and spontaneous, and full of Southern flavor.

“I feel like in life I was lucky enough to have these mentors kind of come in and say, ‘You are great just as you are,’” she related. “‘Your pictures are great just as they are. Just go be Christy.’”

Tabitha Soren - Relief

"The Sumerians were the first to make reliefs,” reads Tabitha Soren’s website in the writeup about the series after which her exhibition at Laney Contemporary is named. “They used stelae to sculpt onto a standing stone to celebrate rulers, gods, and achievements.”

“I think that you could extrapolate from Sumerians celebrating gods and rulers and trying to curry favor with the elite in the town with their work, as something that, even though I’m mark-making, [this] series isn’t about that,” Soren explained. Instead, she’s looking to find wisdom in the “internal struggle.”

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“I hope the work is much more emotionally-based,” she said, “and simple enough to reach a lot of people.”

The series Surface Tension, which, along with images from Relief and the series Running are what form the complete exhibition, goes further to reinforce the Sumerian connection. In those works, Soren has introduced pronounced finger prints onto the surfaces of appropriated images, blowing up the smudge-y marks viewers have undoubtedly encountered in their own lives on the dirty faces of their phones and on their own camera lenses.

“They’re kind of contemporary cave paintings,” she said of the pieces. “I thought that [cave paintings] are mostly animals, but it turns out that the animals are the exceptions. The animals are just the ones that people like to look at. Most of them are handprints.”

“So this pawing that we all do to try to get somewhere outside of ourselves, is definitely connected” to what the Sumerians were doing, she added.

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But Soren’s work is multi-layered, and goes far beyond ancient Sumerian creative concepts. The title “Relief,” for example, not only references the images in the series of the same name (pieces where the artist has made physical alterations akin to relief, transforming the photographs from 2-D to 3-D), but to the need to give an exasperated art-viewing population emotional relief after three years of pandemic strife.

Moreover, the photos belie specificity in the sense that where they are taken or who they are depicting aren’t easily defined. This, says Soren, gives visitors to the exhibition the opportunity to bring their own interpretations to the work.

“It allows the viewer to impose their own baggage, their own trajectory, whatever they’re thinking about or the places they’ve been, to stir up their own memories of that instance,” she related. “And maybe it’s just an emotional memory.”

To Soren, the concept is representative of a shift that she’s seen in herself as an artist and person as the years have gone by, and one that perhaps our society as a whole would benefit from if we all approached the world in the way that she approaches her photography.

“I feel like the older I get the less I believe in a black and white truth, in a true or false, in a you versus me, win/lose: Those dichotomies just don’t work,” she said. “That’s been shattered. I think truth is so complex that I wanted to make art with that many layers.”

Laney Contemporary is located at 1810 Mills B Lane Blvd. in Savannah. There will be an opening reception for both shows on Feb. 10 from 6-8 p.m. (with a food truck on site), as well as an artist talk on Feb. 11 from 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. More information is available at https://www.laneycontemporary.com/.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah GA art galleries: Christy Bush, Tabitha Soren at Laney