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© Maury Gortemiller

Between the Magical and the Mundane

Artist: Maury Gortemiller

Project: Do the Priest in Different Voices

Description: Maury Gortemiller’s years-long project, Do the Priest in Different Voices, was inspired by his early memories of a family Bible. Enthralled by its illustrations, Gortemiller recalls that they “evoked both comfort and trepidation” and “moved me to contemplate the unseen.” This contemplation led him to create photographs that are rich in texture and disarming in their subject.

This spring, the series was published as a book. In his foreword, Richard McCabe calls the surreal images comprising the series “hard to decipher—a mishmash of seemingly dissonant visual elements,” but notes they are in fact subtly connected by “common themes central to art in the South: memory, mythology, family and place.”

Earlier images from the series appeared in a previous Eyes on the South, which you can see here.  

 


Eyes on the South&\#xA0;is curated by&\#xA0;Jeff Rich. The weekly series features selections of current work from Southern artists, or artists whose photography concerns the South. To submit your work to the series, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..





Maury Gortemiller

Maury Gortemiller is an Atlanta-based photographer and educator. In 2009, he received an MFA in Photography, with distinction, from the University of Georgia. His photographs have appeared in exhibitions across the United States, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Aperture Foundation Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. His photographs and writing on photography and film have appeared in Time Magazine, Oxford American, Art Papers, Perdiz Magazine, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Find him on Instagram @elmaurygee.