In Remember the South, artist Frank Frances creates a contemporary re-imagining of colonialism through a fictional adaptation of elements used today that represent a potent past. Frances explores the frustrations of the nuanced variabilities of racism as well as their historical and current implications with a combination of photography, painting, writing, and papercut collages. Elements of racism and stereotypes of the American South, including the use of blackface and other depictions of blackness, confederate symbolism, and crops including watermelon and cotton, are explored in meticulous assemblages, a kind of disturbing beauty that bears witness to inherited traumas that have yet to be fully realized. A visual narrative that is a nod to the systematic integration of a brutal history, Remember the South serves as an ode to the memory of a past that is still being experienced in the present. In the words of James Baldwin, “The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly that now they cannot even speak to one another. It does not demand much reflection to be appalled at the inevitable state of mind achieved by people who dare not speak freely about those things which most disturb them.”
