The 2025 Mississippi Invitational: Call Home

The 2025 Mississippi Invitational, curated by TK Smith and dubbed Call Home, opens with a title wall graphic that incorporates a landline phone dangling, as if abandoned by its user. The white handset—hanging loosely by an orange spiral cord, forever suspended somewhere between connection and disconnection, sets a quietly poignant tone for the exhibition. It also poses a question: Do you make the call?

Although the Invitational’s juried exhibition format does not necessarily demand a connecting subject matter or aesthetic cohesion, it is not surprising that the concept of home emerged organically from the artists’ work. For artists living and working in the Southern United States, there is, perhaps, often an implied pressure to perform and explore Southern identity through one’s artistic practice, and to do so, particularly, for a non-Southern eye. There is an expectation—and, for that matter, market demand—for deep justification and examination of your hometown, your history, your family, even your trauma. Beyond the personal narrative are socioeconomic and political histories that must be considered and deconstructed. Behind all this pressure is the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: Why are you still here? A better question, and one that curator TK Smith poses, might be: What does home mean to you? The answer is, of course, complicated.

Call Home is divided into three sections that address different facets of the concept of home and present varying modes of calling that home. First, The Call, which considers home as a place we leave and come back to. Then, Blood Ties, which looks at how memories and emotions can lodge within us, affecting our senses and lingering to constitute a symbolic, atemporal home. Finally, The Beyond, the most abstract of the three sections, looks toward the afterlife, toward spiritual homes, and toward grief. The exhibition’s framing provides a strategy for interpretation, but it allows the individual works in Call Home to consider multiple themes and angles.

Take, for instance, the first work that one encounters in the maze-like entry to the exhibition’s main galleries: an installation by Emma Lorenz titled You Have XX Messages (2025). Created during a period described as one of “extreme loneliness,” the installation consists of a Panasonic landline telephone with a built-in answering machine recorder. The voicemail playback speaker repeatedly plays a soundscape of found voicemails, personal voicemails from the artist’s family and friends, and other sounds such as the nostalgic “beep” tone between one message ending and another beginning, and the fuzzy sounds of an internet dialup connecting. This work lets you become a voyeur but also invites you to perform the role of the message’s intended subject, as the phrase “I love you” repeats through the tiny speaker. Like so many works in this exhibition, it is deeply personal to the artist while tapping into a common experience of attempted connections, missed. The sounds from You Have XX Messages (2025) can be heard playing throughout the entire exhibition. They act as a gentle but constant reminder of what lies at the heart of Call Home.

A similar voyeurism can be found in viewing the works of painter Jerrod Partridge. Partridge, who was awarded the prestigious Jane Crater Hiatt Artist Fellowship, presents My Domestic Home, a series of bright oil paintings on handmade paper that feature common household scenes such as a pile of unfolded laundry, unwashed dishes in the sink, and, compellingly, a sleeping baby in a carrier perched atop an open dryer. These paintings could be read as confessional, and maybe they are, but they are also gently liberatory. Repurposing the tradition of oil painting to show the realities of home life, recontextualizing piles of laundry, from something to be ashamed of, to something seen as beautiful. This gesture granted me an existential sigh of relief. I know these scenes. In many ways they are also my scenes, and the scenes of my friends and family. Uneasily and unwelcomed, though, the question enters my mind: How would these works be perceived in a gallery in, say, Los Angeles? Would images of a small home in entropy be met with my same sense of familiarity and appreciation, or would they be misconstrued as Southern poverty porn? Thankfully, it’s a non-issue. Call Home does not appear to care about a non-Southern gaze and refuses such stereotypical framings of its artists.

Despite the poignancy of themes such as longing or nostalgia in Call Home, a surprising amount of whimsy and playfulness can be found here, as well. Rylee Brabham’s amusing installations apply humor and theatrical technique to explore how gender performance and identity are formed in childhood. Junk Drawer (2025) is cleverly installed as a comically deep-set drawer that contains, hidden deep within it, a testosterone bottle and syringe. The work nods to the ways we conceal ourselves, even when—or, perhaps, especially when—we’re around family. Their work a breeze or a breath (2025) employs a fan that gently ripples a pink quilt that doubles as a kind of window dressing. The assembled elements of the sculpture share a campy, feminine aesthetic that demonstrates how childhood bedroom home décor can be deeply gender-coded. Nearby, Kaleena Stasiak’s installation Windsocks (2024–ongoing) uses colorful, playfully flaccid windsocks adorned with various patterns and visual signifiers that hint at deeper themes of place and placelessness, and at a proverbial storm yet to come.

Death, or more precisely familial death, and the ways we process loss and the unknown also factor into several artists’ works in Call Home. For artist Alexis McGrigg, considerations of home come with ancestral spirits. In her video work Alterity: Unknown Histories (2023), McGrigg imagines her Great Aunt Tang and a Yoruba figure called the Egungun, who represents the spirits of ancestors. In the video, the artist interacts with the land and the water of Utica, Mississippi, to access her ancestors and the spiritual worlds in which they reside, thereby accessing their own memories and experiences. In this way, the work demonstrates the emotional connections between memory, land, and family ties.

The exhibition—which seems to grow more crowded as the end nears, as if it can’t quite figure out when it’s done enough, when it’s adequately answered the big questions of how and why—finishes with words from famed Mississippian writer and poet Eudora Welty:

There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes—closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home, ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed.

Quoting these words, Call Home ends with a subtle reassurance. Maybe you left, maybe you stayed, maybe you’re a different person now. Maybe home, to you, means love or pain or loss or that common combination of all the above. But just because the phone is off the hook doesn’t mean you can’t pick it up and place a call.

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This review was supported by a travel grant from The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Art Papers would like to acknowledge that TK Smith, curator of “Call Home” serves in a volunteer capacity as a contributing editor of ART PAPERS. We therefore assure our readers that he did not participate in the commissioning or editing of this review, nor has he benefitted financially from its publication.

EC Flamming is a writer, editor, and curator based in Atlanta, GA. She works at Georgia State University’s Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design, and is the managing editor of Gulch Magazine, a publication of visual art and culture in Atlanta. EC’s editorial work focuses on the cultural impacts of moving images and contemporary art to explore how media shapes and reflects social relations. She has written for Art Basel, ART PAPERS, ArtsATL, WUSSY, Screen Slate, Paste, BURNAWAY, Photograph, and Another Gaze. She is a member of WABE radio’s inaugural City Lights Collective and reports weekly art events in Atlanta.