In January, the Yadkin Cultural Arts Center opened an SCA-sponsored exhibit: What Happened? Houck Medford’s Photographic Witness for Floyd County, Virginia, curated by SCA Medford Curatorial Associate Tsing Liu (’23). The exhibit, comprised of platinum photographic prints, will be available to the public through February 24.

We are also pleased to announce a virtual exhibit, curated by Tsing, The Presence of Absence, which is now available online (courtesy of the University Art Collections).

In this online exhibit, Tsing compares the documentary photographs of Houck Medford with those of Professor Emeritus of Art Robert (Bob) Knott, who taught at Wake Forest from 1975 to 2008. As an art historian as well as artist, he pushed for equal weighting when leading Wake Forest’s art department and was a guiding inspiration for the Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art (recently renamed the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art).

As Tsing states in her introduction “While Medford’s What Happened? documents daunting, abandoned structures in rural Virginia, Knott’s Venice: The Laundry Series takes on the narrative of a foreigner’s wandering in historic Venice and the discovery of colorful spontaneity of the mundane. In the absence of human figures, the presence of man-made structures and changes brought about by nature and human intervention may serve as a time machine into the past.”