Fallen Fruit: The Practices of Everyday Life

At 21c, Fallen Fruit’s custom wallpaper patterns represent the spectrum of historical, environmental, and cultural characteristics of Louisville, Kentucky. The wallpaper in the Proof lounge features photographs of the pear tree blossoms that line the sidewalks of downtown and are also common in many other parts of the city. Love blooms, wanes, returns, and revives in the sculptures, photographs, and other objects that constitute It Happens To Everyone Some Day / The Last “Gay” Bar In America.” Images of notable citizens like Henrietta Bingham, David Williams, Stephen Irwin, and others hang beside contemporary pin ups, evoking endless takes of passion, romance, heartbreak, and inspiration.

The red dogwood blooms seen in the main dining room’s wallpaper pattern reference a Cherokee creationist myth, while the framed artworks hanging in this space represent the pre-contact culture of this region prior to the 18th-century European settlement. Kentucky / A Dark and Bloody Ground is titled after a translation from native languages for the name of this region, which once served as a hunting ground, and later a trading post for both settlers and natives. The bison and landscape photographs were taken by the artists at Oldham County’s Woodland Farm in 2016. Taxidermy bison busts hang near the restaurant windows; their majestic features are mirrored in the pop-art portraits hanging amidst the photographs of forests and rivers, Native Americans, historical documents, and other ephemera. The images of Native Americans come from the archives of the Library of Congress, and include 20th-cenrury portraits for which sitters were sometimes costumed, posed, and paid to represent cultures that were already endangered by European-American expansion.

In the west dining room, Farm To Table / 1864 To 2016 honors Kentucky’s agrarian roots, which have sustained this community for over two centuries: the space is wallpapered with images of vegetables and fruits grown at Woodland Farm, some of which are served in the restaurant. Images of some of the complex histories about Kentucky evoke contemporary issues that persist in the United States today, including our relationship to food production, systemic poverty, and urban development. And in the private dining room, All You Need Is Love pays homage to 21c founders Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson: the paintings and objects on view here are drawn from their personal collections, while the wallpaper features patterns of the flowers grown in the gardens of their home in Oldham County.

“The practices of everyday life,” explain the artists, are “everyday interactions by everyday people that create community and generate the stories that become history and mythology. It is both the extraordinary and the overlooked that together simultaneously make a place special and unique. There are moments in life that we share communally, often regionally, and sometimes generationally that are meant to be celebrated, shared, and remembered.”

“These moments may be discovered in the mundane,” the artists continue, “or hidden away in archives for future generations. We are interested in the idea of the public, citizenship, and community, and how everyday people are scribes and artists and documentarians as much as they are strangers, neighbors, and friends. As artists, we realize that it is not one particular story that tells the truth about a place. Instead we believe that community is formed by many different people’s stories and collectively these stories about a place and people form the cultural bonds we celebrate and honor through local traditions and more.”

Founded in 1778, and named after King Louis XVI of France, Louisville as a place has negotiated boundaries and bridged shifts between “here and there” for many generations. Defined by the Ohio River on the north and the west, it was once frontier-land at the edge of the United States; until about 1816 it was one of the gateways to the West. It was a boundary between the North and South during the Civil War, and along the river was a well-known place of crossing along the Underground Railroad, where enslaved African Americans sought escape to freedom. The word “Kentucky” translates from native languages as “a dark and bloody ground” (this region was indeed a hunting ground), but it can also mean “the place of tomorrow.” It was the beginning and end of the explorations of Lewis and Clark. In the 20th century the federal government twice obstructed river access, first by installing massive flood control walls following the Great Flood of 1937, and later in the 1960’s by building interstate highways that block the city’s relationship to its waterfront.

As diverse as the artists found the city, they say, “We learned that one thing Louisvillians have in common is that they are neither Southern nor Northern, not from the West coast or the East coast; they are kind, welcoming people from an important region of Kentucky that has a long history in the United States, and a pride in heritage and love of family that is both steadfast and true. Less well known about Louisville is that the area is home to several expansive historical archives that contain vast collections of photography, film, personal effects, legal documents, and ephemera. These types of archives exist in most major cities in the United States, however the depth and breadth of the archives at the Carnegie Center for Art and History, the Indiana Room at the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library, the University of Louisville, and the Filson Historical Society are exemplary.”

“The archival materials for the installation project activate selected images that explore meanings of everyday life through lenses of other people’s cameras,” observe the artists. “We use the language and phrases excerpted from the pages of other peoples’ notebooks and diaries – although the display of the artwork renders authorship of the material anonymous. After all, our collaboration is with people who we cannot ever really know.”

Some of the images the artists installed may seem cliché or banal, and others are more challenging. The content selected spans several generations, from the mid-1800s to the present day. The nature of archives often contains things that were once part of other people’s families; personal meanings from other peoples’ lives get replaced over time, becoming signifiers that represent a broader understanding. Often the subjects of the stories that are now isolated and recontextualized are transformed in a new context that speaks to and reflects contemporary experiences.

“We believe that contemporary art has the ability to shift vision, alter meaning, and explore humanity,” says Burns and Young, “In these ways both abstraction and collage may appear beautiful to a stranger or passerby, and at the same time could also inspire an in-depth discovery of the sundry and nuanced complexities embedded in these images, objects, and documents from other peoples’ lives. The element of chance is an important part of any discovery. It is the unexpected message you may come across in daily life that redirects your attention, or that important ‘glimpse in a mirror’ that creates a short pause, or an unexpected rainbow you see on a landscape that makes you smile regardless of age. This opportunity to allow the unexpected into our lives may change a perception of space and an experience of time even for a short moment. Like a pause in movement, a flicker in an old film, a pop on an old recording, these glitches are a form of magic that reminds us that life is really happening in the moment and we are all in the process of living it with everyone around us. In these ways both the extraordinary and banal become temporarily equal and these forms of collective experience become integrated with our own authorship of life – in a very basic way we have no other choice.”

Fallen Fruit’s immersion into the people and places that shape community reveals a universal, defining aspect of the human condition, hunger – to be fed, to be seen, to belong, to be loved. The persistence of these desires fosters the continuity of ritual: the practices of everyday life don’t really change – we eat, drink, we talk, we congregate and celebrate in ways that would be recognizable to our forbearers at least a century ago, and these acts retain meaning and promise.

Alice Gray Stites | Museum Director, Chief Curator