New work by Abe Partridge

with work by Pastor Jimmy Morrow and Anthony Feyer

Abe Partridge is a touring musician and artist from Mobile, AL; fundamentally a storyteller who fuses a heady mix of backwoods baptismal and back alley punk rock. His background as a baptist preacher who experienced a crisis/conversion of faith allows him to travel roads less traveled. For the last two years Partridge has made regular visits and embedded himself in several communities of Appalachian religious snake-handlers. After much time spent, he was given permission to document his experiences; the music, rituals, and stories that called to him. This is an exhibition of new work exploring those experiences, made in direct collaboration with this community.

In 2020 In the bringing of a world-wide pandemic, after all of Abe’s gigs got canceled he sat at home a little lost and reading. In Salvation on Sand Mountain he read a passage describing psychedelic rock n roll being performed in small and remote places, churches that handle snakes and drink poison as a matter of faith; making music that that was otherwise undocumented. Abe started going to churches and congregations throughout Appalachia, looking first for the music, but he found more. Abe knows well the ways in which remote religious communities are more often exploited, or unfairly portrayed as a cultural straw man for ‘conservative ignorance’. His goal here was to testify to the human dignity and community found in these places, and to value it fairly.

What followed over two years is a body of work that painstakingly documents every person he has met, and every hero (or occasional villain) of lore tied to the specific and small communities surrounding the Appalachian snake-handling religious community. Dedicated portraits that utilize Abe’s symbolic language (flowers, rainbows, and flames) are bolstered by long-form quotes, oral histories direct from the subject’s mouth or Abe’s account of what he’s been told. The core members of the community who participated, feeding Abe their stories, were given editorial power over what was produced. Abe uses field recordings, writing, music, found video and painting to rally around the wild and liminal experiences that have changed him in proximity to these people, and to facilitate the community creating their own portrait through him. With Signs Following is the lens by which you might stand in Abe’s shoes to peer out on a community and a faith, that you might feel what he’s felt – reverence, panic and awe– and that you might know the love and joy of being known in a place that was unknowable to you.

OPENING RECEPTION

January 21 @ 6 PM

Generous funding for this exhibition and related programming is provided by: