Ella Floyd - NO ELEGY NEEDED

A “holler” is a Southern Appalachian colloquial slang term for a “hollow”, which is defined as “a small, sheltered valley that usually–but not necessarily–has a watercourse". Acting as a haven for the characters depicted throughout the series, our setting ("the holler") is shown through a series of vignettes capturing the characters in their all-but-real environment, jumping between the line between fantasy and reality. Discussing themes such as spirituality, grief, folklore, drug-use, and psychopathy, “the light” aims to transport the viewer into the storybook world in between fiction and their lived experience with urban Appalachian folklore. Using common Appalachian urban legends, such as the Mothman, as well as chemical-affected personal memories following a traumatic drug overdose in 2018 as inspiration, photos are used to manufacture my own Appalachian story, rejecting both the stereotype of the region as well as the trauma and drug-impacted recollections of my own childhood memory.

Exploring both perceived and actual hallucination and grandeur, the viewer is transported to the new, psychochemical setting of a familiar Americana narrative. Using expanded flash and lighting, photos are to be viewed as an expression of attempted restoration of a lost, damaged, manipulated, and misremembered personal archive, both my own and shared through other adolescence from the greater Appalachian community. Continuing to add my personal position as an Appalachian to the long, growing story of those mountains, my work explores a greater phenomenon of loss, disassociation, unease, nostalgia, and psychochemical effects.

2020 - Present