CANKER is a meditation on the tenacity of the Floridian spirit. The series confronts our stark history of environmental devastation and natural loss: twisted branches reaching for the sky, rotting fruit scattered on the dirt, and the sun-bleached bones of native Floridian wildlife.
Beginning in 1910, citrus canker clawed at the skin of the Sunshine State, devouring its emerald groves and devastating the citrus industry. In a fight that continues to this day, the series poses the question: what does it mean to thrive in the face of continued loss? CANKER seeks to evoke complex emotions: grief for the death of our groves, but also a profound respect for the perseverance of the Floridian spirit.
Artist: Matthew Lowry & The Flamingo County Players
Album: Flamingo County
Photographed Album Release Show at Union Hall - Lakeland, FL.
Artist: Van Plating
Album: Orange Blossom Child
Personal Edits from Promotional Imagery
Artist: Matthew Lowry
Album: Flamingo County
Art Directed and Photographed Album Cover and Promotional Imagery
Artist: Van Plating
Album: Orange Blossom Child
Photographed Album Cover and Promotional Imagery
“I’ve been thinking a lot about sense of place and story in my own art and in those of my counterparts here and around the country. How it all relates and conversely, how it’s different. My next record is diving more into that sense of place—being the gal that according to my bio ‘has a rugged vulnerability uniquely hers ─ fermented in the orange groves and hot verdant summers of the sunshine state.’ This next Van Plating record will be called “Orange Blossom Child” as I’ve traveled and had many conversations about genre and sense of place in music, I keep coming back to the thriving culture I know surrounding me, filled with so much goodness. I want to make a wave together, from here.
So—for artists that span the spaces from the panhandle to the fountain of youth—from the cape to the keys back across inland where the groves and springs bubble with mysteries and everything in between. Rivers and primordial creatures. Outlaws and traveling performers, mermaids, seers, citrus, and cowpokes. Think of OBC like a blanket term the way we use Americana as an umbrella with so many subgenres underneath it but used to delineate place among us storytellers from the sunshine state who have that little undercurrent of folk.
We’re a little darker, a little edgier, a little more eccentric and mystical than our counterparts from other places. We should call it a thing and make it a thing, I think a lot about our heritage as artists from here—from Gram Parsons to John Anderson, to Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers to Allman Bros, Skynyrd and so many more. There’s so much here.
Anyway, I’m doing it and all y’all wild Florida bbs are welcome to join. This is for all of us.”
[thoughts surrounding Orange Blossom Country as a genre, from Van Plating]
“When I was growing up, my mom thought it was important to preserve our Florida roots. ‘You are an 8th generation Floridian’ she would say, as she showed me all of the old Florida places that people had forgotten. She wanted to show me where I came from, so I would always be proud to be where I am.
She spent hours telling me the stories of our cattle-driving, resourceful, pioneering family. I learned math on headstones by death dates, in old abandoned cemeteries, where we cleaned and traced our family tree. I learned to read on endless microfiche spools in historical libraries. I learned to cook on a campfire before a stove, I didn’t realize there was anything other than cast iron. I learned to forage and identify edible plants and flowers while she told me stories of her grandfather’s cattle ranch in Arcadia and his days of being a foreman on Bok Tower in Lake Wales, where her mother was born.
She taught me the old ways of listening to mother earth and how nature whispered the answers I sought. The whispers came as a rustle in the bushes, babbling streams, crickets serenades, crashing waves, gentle breezes, and delightful smells. I spent more nights outside than inside, sharing tales of old Tampa where my grandmother rolled cigars in factories. We navigated by stars and read by candlelight, so I could read a map and orientate. We swam with mermaids in Weeki Wachee, sang with Seminoles in Okeechobee, canoed with alligators in the Alafia River, and watched Naval ships come into port in Jacksonville. We sat through rainstorms and had toothpick races down drainage ditches. We picked flowers (that I had to name first), watched missile launches at Cape Canaveral, and cataloged shells on the beaches. We built fires and shelters, then antique in Mount Dora. She taught me to ride horses and weave (more than just tall tales).
This is how I learned about Florida, through my mother’s eyes and then by experiencing it through mine. So much of Florida is filled with my Mom…in truth, they are both my mom. Both she and Florida raised me - filling me with wisdom. Now they both only come in whispers - Mom, know that I am proud of where I am.”
[Memories of Old Florida and Joan Fischer, written by her daughter, Michelle Fischer Pugh]
Katie & her PaPaw’s Lakehouse off Lake Buffem / Florida
Mayfly - by Katie McNutt
“I stood on the porch, looking out towards the lake. Remembering back to a time when the dock stretched out long enough to reach the deep, dark water where you could jump off the end and cannonball into the cool water that smelled of earth and summer and cat tails. As I slid my hands into the pockets of my faded and ripped jeans, I brought my focus to the screen door inches from my nose. Mayflies. Dozens of them. Stuck to the door. I only noticed them when the light breeze fluttered their dead wings just enough to catch your eye. Mayflies are very delicate, living only one day. I studied them as they clung to the door, lifeless, but clinging nonetheless. I began thinking about how precious life was.
I could hear my mother unloading the groceries in the kitchen and my grandfather watching Gunsmoke in the back room. This was life. This was a day in my life and I treasured these moments. Walking to the room where my grandfather sat in his chair, I sat with him and watched the ending of the western episode he loved so much. As I studied the room I noticed little things about my grandfather that seemed new to me. How he kept important papers on his reading table closest to him. How he sat quietly, listening to the story between the outlaws and the women on tv, and how he had pictures of us, his family, all around. Pictures of my mother as a young girl, pictures of my brother and myself growing up, pictures of his time playing basketball and being inducted into hall of fames. Pictures of the things he loved and had pride for.
I hear my mother call my name and go to help her in the kitchen. She seems flustered and I can see she is worried, but using frustration and forced humor to hide her raw feelings. We are both worried. We both love the old man that lives in this house on the lake more than we know what to do with. As I help her straighten the kitchen and collect the trash, we look around this old house, knowing someday things will be much different than they are now. I look back one last time to the lake and take a deep breath in, remembering the smells of the house, the lake, and the long days of summer. And I notice the Mayflies clinging to the door. Using them as a reminder to live each day with gratitude and in awe of the life we are given.
-for my Papaw.”
Abby & her Food Forest / Lakeland, FL
Southern and Southern-Protestant culture promote behaviors of feminine passivity disguised as grace. They are often used as a silencing mechanism to the expression of the female experience as well as structures of control within Southern religious and social circles. We are taught the ways to be considered graceful within society, as well as the religious steps necessary to achieve God’s coveted grace, but are rarely presented with a concept of grace that is otherwise outwardly serving.
An Empty Grace was a site-specific work that featured the audio interviews of five women, Southern-born, sharing their ranging definitions and intimate experiences of living within a culture of a poorly defined grace. They are women with the weight of their marriages and divorces placed upon them despite unfaithful partners, women with physical ailments that have caused their grace and worth to be questioned, and many more. Their voices echo within the space of an empty chapel–supplemented only by life-sized photographic imagery representative of anonymity and the reduction of the female form in the name of this so-called “grace.”
The religious promotion of our original state as one of unworthiness found within a social environment that encourages female passivity produces a highly destructive experience for the Southern and Southern-religious woman. The two most impactful elements of the feminine experience within her own culture are contributing equally to the significant lessening of herself, and the combined weight is emptying and destructive.
We are not God, and our gracefulness has an end.
A Present Moment is a collection of 35mm black and white film scans depicting mirrored reconstructions of perception within a landscape, produced by paralleled manipulations. These works are meant to encourage the attuning of one's personal awareness of the environment and the potential of all its uses.
Exposed Identities / Lakeland, FL / Various Models