Judson Womack

Lives and works in Jackson, MS, USA

Artist statement

Out in the woods of the Deep South, there's a cemetery where my entire family is buried. My living grandmother has her headstone, my parents and I have our plots. Something unnatural has happened here. My existence and my eventual nonexistence have been made to inhabit this place together, and so the catastrophe has, in a way, already happened. I believe I've absorbed some quality of this place, or maybe I believe it’s impossible for me not to have in my coming of age here. This work—wandering across this landscape where the nation’s primordial narratives of freedom, slavery, and capital still collide, has been a search for whatever that embodied essence is. I think it might be “death.” Maybe that’s too simple. It’s more an awareness of terminability that this place taught me before I was ready. It's an essence of confinement, of catastrophic inevitability, both literally in my grave and conceptually in how I understand this society and culture—the Gothic, maybe, at the heart of my Southerness. Then, does it also hold special meaning to photograph here? The camera also binds existence and nonexistence together into a singular form. This apparatus imposes my terminable essence, so what is this act? Might I give these subjects rest by making their photograph—lay them down? Or revive them for all time, as evidence I saw them this way? Early on, I searched the canon for an image-maker engaging with the complexities of this Southern place. Dawoud Bey was, for me, the first to...

Artwork