Bless Your Heart brings together three Appalachian photographers—Will Major, Billie Wheeler, and Zac Wilson—for an exhibition that employs stiff tongue in cheek to examine the region. Hanging salon style with a maximalist impulse, photos, mixed media experiments, and found objects blend late ‘90s and early ‘00s nostalgia with a campy appreciation for rural culture: kitschy flea market finds, memorabilia from Dollywood vacations, the spectacle of amateur wrestling, and crucifixes of all sizes pepper the Southern landscape. Their works are like visions from an Appalachian dreamscape, spurred by falling asleep with the TV on.
Wilson’s The Five Stages of Grief (2024), impeccably sets the tone for the exhibition. In the image, Bozo is beaming as a sullen woman tries her hand at the fabled Grand Prize Game. The context for these characters resembles an abandoned office suite and feels like a post-capitalist purgatory–adding to the disheartening and surreal mood. Wheeler’s Onion Cutting (2024) feels equally wry in its heightened state. The photo’s subject holds a knife against her forehead, her eyes severely bloodshot as she turns away from the cutting board and vegetable vapor. Her pose resembles a fainting scene from an old, melodramatic Hollywood movie.
Self-portraits of the three artists are sprinkled throughout the exhibition. But rather than reveal, each probes the psyche. There’s Hidden Appalachia (2022), a transfixing photo of Major in a Ghillie suit, barely concealed among rocks on the side of a mountain range. He gazes reverently at the sky as if witnessing physical evidence of the great beyond. Another features Wheeler with sunny-side-up eggs for eyes, Self Portrait, (2021), the yolks running down her cheeks like gooey, grimy tears.
One of the most striking pieces in the exhibition finds Wilson portraying Norman Bates, the protagonist from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. In the original thriller, Bates murders his abusive mother and keeps her corpse locked in his fruit cellar, living in denial about her death and assuming her persona as one of his alters. In Wilson’s photo We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes (2023), the artist, dressed as Bates, gazes toward the camera with an emotionless expression as Mother’s hand rests eerily and lovingly on his shoulder. Wilson himself constructed the accompanying scenery; its wood-paneled walls, cream carpet, and kitschy decor make the locale more reminiscent of a ranch home basement than an abandoned room in the Bates’ Victorian manor or neighboring motel. The photo’s frame is combined with a windowsill planter stuffed with fake pink and purple flowers, complimenting the self-portrait’s Kodachrome-like palette. The entire assemblage is outlandish and inscrutable in the best way.
Documentary wedges in the show, too, but with a wink and a smirk—making the viewer further question what’s real versus what’s performed. The sky-high roadside mailbox in Major’s Air Mail (2021) presumably carries messages meant for the Lord above. Wheeler’s Wife (2023) shows a one-word tombstone whose tenderness renders its subject almost anonymous.
Together, Major, Wheeler, and Wilson have amassed a delightfully puzzling exhibition that’s less concerned with documenting the mountain region they call home and more about capturing a sardonic appreciation of Appalachian sensibilities. Unburdened by a hunt for truth, these photographers act out wild visions, don eccentric characterizations, or stage pop-culture homages that harken to their pre-internet, analog-media-filled upbringings. There’s reverence here but also a rejection of stereotypical depictions of the region and its residents as old-fashioned, stone-faced, or defined by trauma. The resulting show marks a feat for these photographers who confidently embrace the lighthearted to make sense of their surroundings.
