{Photograph} courtesy of Blair Hobbs
Ruby Turpin spends almost all of Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” telling herself and others what a great, God-fearing girl she is, how grateful she is that the Lord has made her so.
The darkish irony of this—the sort present in a lot of O’Connor’s work—is that Mrs. Turpin is, actually, one of many worst varieties of individuals: a judgmental racist who seems to be down on these she deems “white trash.” The one particular person in “Revelation” who sees Mrs. Turpin in all of her hypocrisy is a younger lady named Mary Grace. So enraged is Mary Grace by Mrs. Turpin’s ignorance that she hits her within the face with a guide referred to as Human Improvement in a physician’s ready room, catalyzing in Mrs. Turpin a profound, prophetic awakening.
Multidisciplinary artist Blair Hobbs‘s “I Was Mary Grace from ‘Revelation’” (2024) lands upon its viewer with related revelatory drive. Skilled like a imaginative and prescient, the combined media assemblage offers us Hobbs as Mary Grace as fever dream. The determine floats on a canvas of high-pigment cerulean blue, adorned with sequins and glitter, these well-known peacocks and O’Connor quotes decontextualized in Hobbs’ light cursive: “Lady! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you aren’t? God!”
“I Was Mary Grace” and almost 20 different works by Hobbs shall be on view at Spalding Nix Wonderful Artwork from March 14 to Might 9 in Birthday Cake for Flannery—curated as a part of the gallery’s ECHOES exhibition—in honor of the Georgia-born Southern Gothic author’s a hundredth birthday. Viewers acquainted with O’Connor’s singular physique of labor will acknowledge pictures, allusions and characters from a few of her most well-known tales—Sensible Blood, “A Good Man is Laborious to Discover,” “Good Nation Folks,” and “Parker’s Again.”
{Photograph} courtesy of Blair Hobbs
The thought for the present was born of Hobbs’s revisiting of a few of O’Connor’s most celebrated works after retiring final August from instructing on the College of Mississippi. She discovered herself re-enchanted with O’Connor’s darkish humor, grotesque characters, her meanness, and the lunatics and freaks that populate her tales.
“I used to be studying her in school,” Hobbs says. “I joined a sorority, however Reagan-era sorority lady was probably not my cup of tea. My dad had gone to Harvard, and I cherished the romance of the academy. However dressing up like Minnie Mouse for a step-singing competitors wasn’t actually doing it for me. I began feeling depressed, and I actually recognized with Mary Grace of “Revelation” . . . I used to be conflicted and located plenty of unusual consolation within the mental freaks [O’Connor] wrote.”
{Photograph} courtesy of Blair Hobbs
Hobbs—now a full-time artist residing in Oxford, Mississippi, together with her husband, author John T. Edge—brings these outcasts to life in Birthday Cake for Flannery, her use of craft retailer provides akin to glitter, paper hearts, and ribbon an intentional juxtaposition, a deliberate elevation of those “female” supplies to the realm of high quality artwork.
“I’ve all the time cherished sparkly issues,” Hobbs says, “majorette uniforms, Haitian flags, twinkly Christmas lights. I get excited within the craft aisles of huge field shops the place I acquire sparkly duct tape, gold leaf, mirrored beads, and glossy papers. In these aisles, I’m nearly all the time amongst ladies. I by no means purchase stencils, scrapbook stickers—any product that predicts an consequence. As an alternative, I like to make use of the craft objects in a extra subversive manner. I don’t assume {that a} portrait of Sensible Blood’s Hazel Motes, simply after he’s blinded himself with acid, is the anticipated consequence of a Walmart craft aisle basket.”
{Photograph} courtesy of Blair Hobbs
The items in Birthday Cake for Flannery invite viewers not solely to have interaction with what such a subversion may imply in Hobbs’s interpretation of those sophisticated characters—but in addition, as O’Connor does in her fiction, with the variations of these characters which may reside inside us.
O’Connor’s work asks readers to confront a few of the ugliest, darkest elements of Southern life. Hobbs’s feverish, folk-inspired, epiphanic collages deliver them glittering, glowing into the sunshine.
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