Micah McCoy, Minor Prophet
Through Saturday, December 7, 2024
Gallery hours
Saturday, November 9, 11am-3pm
Saturday, November 15, 11am-3pm
Saturday, November 22, 11am-3pm
Saturday, November 29, 11am-3pm
Friday, December 6, 6–9pm – Artist’s Reception
Saturday, December 7, 11am-3pm – Last Look
Artist’s Statement
Minor Prophet is loosely based on the Judeo-Christian story of Job, and witnesses a family faced with existential crisis in a chillingly desperate landscape. Centering around the family home, the photographs chart the psychological space of my family’s private inner world. As I’ve photographed our farmhouse, the surrounding lands and took portraits of myself and my family, I began to see our home as a canvas on which the various sectors of our consciousness were laid bare.
This series blurs the line between traditional documentary and the fictional, leveraging the illusion of photographic truth to allow the individual characters in the narrative to function as surrogates in mythmaking. The resulting fable is scaffolded by photographic strategies that reinforce the monumentality of the biblical origins inherent in the work. The series focuses on the frailty of human life, contrasted with the resilience of the land. Precise sequencing allows an open-ended narrative to crystalize. An amalgamation of portraits and rural landscapes tie the characters to the land, emphasizing the connection between place and its embedded religious history. These photographs act as a modern parable, an updated story of doubt for a modern audience.
Curator’s Statement
“Men sat in the street wagering their souls all / while I just wanted to wake up. / I’ve been here before across the bridge to home,” Micah McCoy writes in one of the poems that bears a weight equal to that of his photographs in Minor Prophet. Implausibly enough, I too have been here before; he and I are from towns just 15 miles apart in a central Illinois county of fewer than 17,000 of those souls.
So I know this landscape intimately. What I don’t know is the world of this work. At least not yet, even after repeated viewings (a state of affairs which I enjoy very much). That’s because – as is proper – Minor Prophet is not “about” any particular place on the face of this earth. Which is to say that it is not descriptive of a location, but rather evocative of a situation that pervades both inside and outside the maker – an ultimately unresolvable situation at that.
There are four “characters” (whom we meet in staged photographs that subtly suggest interiorities that are perhaps not entirely frictionless with one another) and they appear to be a family. Still life pictures – of scissors, or of some communion wafers – portend without too much specificity. The plains are nondescript, and although we recognize a variety of seasons, this work does seem to me to have a mind of winter; one hears misery in the sound of this wind.
Nostalgia is often supposed of (or imposed upon) black-and-white photography, but here the tensions and ambiguities are simply too fresh, too wholly present, to belong to any history. “I do desire to summon a wistfulness but if the pictures relate in some way to the past, I think their primary dialect is regret,” Micah says. What’s done is done, but regret is the inescapable echo of what’s done. It stays always close to hand.
Now – mind you – all of this is the artist’s creation. The actual members of his family, and the actual home and land which they inhabited, have nothing to do with this. Micah is a photographer, and the gift/curse of his camera is that he can (must) make use of the absolutely real to convey the absolutely unreal. As proof: “I didn’t really learn anything new about myself or my family while making this work,” he notes. “I had pictures in my mind that I wanted to make, that I believe say certain things.” This, I believe, is why we photographers choose to work with and through our strange machines. To make pictures – which are new things in the world, and different in kind from that world – not mere documents of things already existent.
Speaking to the core of this work, Micah describes “a family faced with existential crisis in a chillingly desperate landscape.” Every unhappy family is for sure unhappy in its own way; I submit that every artist is similarly broken in his or her own way. Minor Prophet stands plainly as evidence of Micah McCoy’s brokenness, and – more importantly – as testament to his longing to make tenuous communion (to wager his soul) with the people and places that are the stubbornly actual stuff of this world, which is the only one we have.
Tim Carpenter
December 2022
About the Artist
Micah McCoy is a photographer, curator, and poet based in Northwest Arkansas. He received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (2022) and has exhibited work in solo and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. His work explores issues of religiosity, anxiety, and social detachment. Micah’s editorial photography has been featured in publications including NBC News, The New York Post, and others.
He is a co-founder of Disparate Projects, a platform for photographic curation, theory, and publishing, including Disparate Press, which focuses on producing books and zines that showcase innovative photography and collaborative work.