Christy Bush: Familiar and Tabitha Soren: Relief at Laney Contemporary, Savannah

Christy Bush, Tia Ascending, 2018; archival pigment print

Tabitha Soren, St. Helena, 2019; archival pigment print with unique paper cuts

Laney Contemporary is pleased to present two solo exhibitions by artists Christy Bush and Tabitha Soren, organized by Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta.

A rebellious punk rock kid from Atlanta, Christy Bush moved to Athens, GA in the early ’90s and fell in with a well-known group of creatives and musicians. Her photographs, spanning decades, traverse photographic genres with ease, serving as a process of remembering through intimate connection with her subjects and surroundings. Bush’s most recent series, Familiar, presents an introspective study of intimate relationships as it explores themes of vulnerability and empowerment through empathetic, constructed portraits. The work spans thirty years of photography, including Bush’s investigation of coming of age and generational unity as well as her work in fashion and celebrity portraiture. A monograph of this series was published by The Bitter Southerner in 2022. 

A visual artist in different domains for over twenty-five years, Tabitha Soren has long explored the intersection of psychology, culture, politics, and the body. Books, research studies, and statistics lay a necessary analytical foundation for the visual ideas she communicates. These data points then merge with her experiences growing up in a military family, spending her youth moving around the world and adjusting to cultural differences, social structures, and visual cues that came with each relocation. A through-line connects the three bodies of work, evoking the universal paranoia and contemplation of our historical moment. In Relief, Soren manipulates beautiful landscapes and formal portraits by cutting, bending, burning, blasting, or shooting the paper they are printed on, removing the screen as interlocutor between hand and image and closing the circle that began with Running by similarly suggesting a future that might closely resemble the past.

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