F Magazine

ELI GREENE
FLOODS
NOVEMBER 17, 2024 – JANUARY 12, 2025

F is pleased to present Floods, a solo exhibition by Galveston, Texas-based artist Eli Greene. Floods consists of interrelated photographic and sculptural works that fold together sites in Galveston and Columbia, Tennessee, where Greene’s family has lived for generations. The exhibition is on view by appointment, from November 17, 2024 – January 12, 2025, at 4225 Gibson Street, Houston TX, 77007, with a public reception on November 17, from 2–5 pm.

IMAGES

The Galveston site is an empty lot that sits at the corner of Sealy Avenue and Reverend James B. Thomas Blvd., directly in front of the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church. The lot has been abandoned since the house that used to be there was destroyed during Hurricane Ike in 2008. Some of the house’s foundation posts remain, sticking out of the neatly kept lawn, remnants of its pier and beam construction. On most of the remaining posts rest concrete blocks that may have been chunks of the original building or shims for its foundation. The blocks are made of tabby concrete, a material ubiquitous in Galveston, which is made through the burning of oyster shells to create lime, an essential component to concrete. Because of its production process, in tabby the shells (or the shell’s impressions) sometimes remain whole.

The first of two sites in Columbia, Tennessee is the Mt. Zion Baptist Church Cemetery, the resting place of many in Greene’s family, including her mother, her grandparents, her uncle, cousin, and great aunts and uncles. This is a place she has been many times since she was a child, and when there she often also revisits certain graves for those unknown to her. The second Columbia site is a burial ground for the enslaved on the grounds of the Rippa Villa plantation, a short drive away from Mt. Zion. The grave markers for these plots were not placed originally and have either commemorative inscriptions for the collective remains or are uninscribed. Visitors leave stones on the markers, which have in some places piled up.

In Floods, Greene displays photographs of the posts and blocks from the Galveston site as three individual black-and-white photocopies of small silver gelatin prints and as two enlarged black-and-white photocopied grids. The gridded enlargements are made from the same 35mm film as the small prints but reworked: the negatives have been rephotographed, on a light box, with an iPhone, through a loupe. One of the gridded works (which depicts a chain link fence, foliage, and a broken concrete post) is installed directly onto the panes of the gallery’s window with the image facing outside. Inside, this image is visible, illuminated through the paper prints backlit by sunlight. One panel of this grid is left uninstalled, letting the lush greenery of a bush outside spill into the room through the bare windowpane. On the wall across the gallery hangs the second grid enlargement, which depicts one of the tabby concrete blocks on its post as photographed from above.

On either side of the window-installed grid are two works which both include photographic images derived from the sites in Tennessee. To the right of the window grid work, a wall-mounted light box illuminates hand-tinted photocopies of photographs depicting fake flowers placed on a grave at Mt. Zion Baptist Church Cemetery. To the window grid’s left, resting on the floor, are two faux-tabby concrete tiles installed touching end-to-end, on which rests a stack of cut glass with photocopied prints between the layers, prints that depict stone piles on an unmarked grave. One of the faux-tabby tiles has a name engraved into it: Marie.

Eli Greene (b. New York City, 1987) lives in Galveston, TX. Her work has been exhibited at The Smart Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Regards, Goldfinch, and Produce Model (all Chicago). Greene holds a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from The University of Chicago. She currently teaches photography at Rice University, Houston.

Clockwise from door:

loupe 2, 2024
Xerox on tracing paper, bulldog clips, tape
38 x 48 inches

foundations 1 (for beverly), 2024
Xerox on copy paper
10 x 8 inches

foundations 2 (for devin), 2024
Xerox on copy paper
10 x 8 inches

foundations 4, 2024
Xerox on copy paper
10 x 8 inches

mother hunger, 2024
“Old World Tabby” porcelain pavers, hurricane impact glass, Xerox on onion skin paper
2 x 47 x 23 1/2 inches

loupe 1, 2024
Xerox on vellum, tape
Dimensions variable

light box 13 (fake flowers), 2017, 2024
Light box, acrylic, hand-tinted Xerox on vellum
35 x 18 1/2 x 12 inches

F
4225 Gibson Street
Houston TX 77007

For more information, please contact Adam Marnie at office@fmagazine.info