Spring 2022 Showcase Gaines

Lucy Gaines

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fag

Poet, Artist, Student of Literature and Culture… Persistent Inquirer and Collector of Things, Mai refuses a singular definition. Like the community and environment around her, “I am constantly changing,” says Mai. A longtime resident of Oxford, she is both at home and unusual in a place like Mississippi, a place at once confronting and embracing its former selves. Her daily journey traverses the sidewalks connecting nature to city, history to memory, routine to eccentricity in a sensory-laden experience as amorphous as Mai herself. The community that opens its mind to Mai’s world finds beauty amongst the trash, and occasionally, a trashed beauty.

In form, Portrait seeks to embody the blurred lines between art and documentary, subject and documentarian. It is a highly collaborative and responsive piece that, though entirely observational, traces bildungsroman-esque themes. Featuring Mai’s original poetry, candid commentary, and most-liked tweets, the dialogue itself is a conglomeration of voices from past and present. My practice in part responds to Anna Tsing, surrendering to uncertainty with an “art of noticing” that, as a result, grounded me in a community of the uncertain.

A lifelong student of Southern Literature and Art, Lucy Gaines is deeply inspired by the themes of identity, mythology, and environment associated with authors of the Southern Renaissance. A filmmaker and writer herself, she reconsiders the southern “sense of place” in depictions of the ever-changing landscape and the beings who inhabit it. Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, she earned her B.A. and B.F.A. in English Literature and Studio Art from Rhodes College in Memphis, then practiced writing and marketing in Nashville before returning to Mississippi. Now at the University of Mississippi, she is pursuing her Master’s in Southern Studies and Documentary Expression.