The Task That Is the Toil — Photography

The Task That Is the Toil - Photography

Curatorial Vision and Conceptual Framing

In August 2021, as the world staggered out of quarantine shadows, the Linda Matney Gallery in Williamsburg offered a gathering that felt less like an exhibition than a threshold. The Task That Is the Toil, curated by John Lee Matney, was conceived not as a direct chronicle of the pandemic but as a meditation on what it means to descend and return - to enter darkness and then climb, haltingly, back toward air.

The title itself, lifted from Virgil’s Aeneid by way of Jung, set the tone: facilis descensus Averno … sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est. “Easy is the descent to Avernus; but to retrace one’s steps and emerge once more into light - that is the task, that is the toil.” The words resonate as myth and psychology, as allegory and omen: Avernus as the underworld, but also as collective ordeal, unconscious dread, or the long night of history.

Matney’s curatorial frame drew on this doubleness. The works he gathered did not illustrate catastrophe; instead, they carried its reverberations. Folklore, dreams, myth, and memory surfaced across media, allowing viewers to encounter resilience less as lesson than as atmosphere. Critic Margaret Richardson noted that the show’s very title signaled its multivalence: a layering of modes that refused the bluntness of literalism.

In this light, the exhibition became a chorus of crossings - each artwork a fragment of descent and return, each gesture a step in the arduous climb. Rather than situating itself only in 2021, the exhibition widened its temporal field, asking viewers to see themselves inside a pattern older than the present moment: to understand resilience as a ritual, a task forever retold, forever undertaken.

Southern Storytelling with a Global Perspective

While the exhibition’s themes were universal, its character was deeply informed by Matney’s Southern background and cosmopolitan reach. A Virginia native who began his art career in Athens, Georgia - a 1980s–90s crucible of progressive art and music - Matney shaped the show through this dual identity. Nearly half of the twenty-plus participating artists had ties to Athens or the University of Georgia, while many others came from Virginia and the South. The result was a curatorial mix steeped in Southern storytelling - with its gothic undertones, historical burdens, and folk traditions - but broadened through an international reach extending to Chicago, New York, California, France, Brazil, China, and beyond.

This integration manifested in subject matter: Southern historical memory placed in conversation with universal myth. The Civil War haunted the walls alongside Japanese folklore; Christian and Classical imagery mingled with African American vernacular traditions; personal dreams intersected with ancient archetypes. As Richardson observed, Matney’s affinity for Southern-connected artists was clear, but so too was his determination to situate them in a larger, global field of resonance.

Through Shadows and Shards: Photography in the Exhibition

Among the most resonant works in The Task That Is the Toil were those made through photography, a medium uniquely attuned to thresholds of time, memory, and shadow. Four artists - Lee Matney, Eliot Dudik, Iris Wu, and Benjamin Rouse - used the camera less as a mirror than as a passageway, leading viewers through archives, rituals, reveries, and metamorphoses.

Lee Matney, Shards (Jeremy Ayers), 1994/2021

Matney’s diptych Shards operated as the exhibition’s keystone, a portrait of Jeremy Ayers that seemed to return from the underworld of the archive. First made in 1994 and re-edited in 2021, the image trembles with temporal disjunction: Ayers gazes steadily outward, wearing a lapel pin of his mother as a child, while spectral disturbances - a miniature horse, a wavering flag, a haze of digital static - ripple at the margins.

The photograph is at once elegy and invocation. Ayers, activist, Warhol figure, and Athens muse, becomes a companion in passage - the mentor who once guided a young photographer now re-emerges as a steadying witness. In Shards, memory does not console; it fractures, recomposes, and instructs. To look at Ayers here is to glimpse resilience itself: not the erasure of what was broken, but the act of carrying the fragments forward.

Eliot Dudik, Matthew Grason, 7th South Carolina Died, 256 Times, 2013–15

If Shards reclaimed a personal lineage, Eliot Dudik’s photograph staged history as an endless loop. His large-scale image of a Civil War reenactor lying in Confederate gray, eyes wide and unblinking, is both intimate portrait and chilling allegory. This is a man who has “died” hundreds of times in ritual combat, rehearsing a trauma not his own but one that clings to a region’s marrow.

The photograph refuses to close. The reenactor’s upward gaze fixes the viewer, drawing us into complicity with cycles of remembrance that refuse to relent. In the context of the exhibition, Dudik’s work read like a Virgilian tableau: the South trapped at the gates of Avernus, reliving a defeat that has become inheritance. Where Matney’s Ayers offers return, Dudik’s reenactor warns of entrapment - a body caught in the ritual of endless descent.

Iris Wu, Photographs (2010s–2020s)

Iris Wu’s images moved in a different register, one of dream and reverie. Chinese-born, her photographs blur the threshold between waking and unconscious states, suspending the everyday in atmospheres that feel both luminous and estranged. Wu does not destabilize so much as open: her frames act as portals, where the familiar bends into the uncanny, where surfaces harbor unseen depths.

Placed in dialogue with Southern memory and myth, Wu’s work widened the exhibition’s scope. She showed that liminality is not parochial but universal, a shared human condition that threads across cultures and histories. By folding dream logic into the curatorial arc, Wu made Virgil’s metaphor reverberate far beyond the South, reminding us that the journey out of darkness is also cross-cultural, a language of transformation spoken everywhere.

Benjamin Rouse, Forbidden Needs I & II (2017) and White Pigeon with Hand (2018)

Rouse’s photographs turned inward, making the body itself a site of metamorphosis. In Forbidden Needs I & II, mirror manipulations fuse two figures into a spectral hybrid, intimacy made uncanny. In White Pigeon with Hand, a still-life of pigeon, armored glove, and scattered clay balls reads like a fable of fragility and control, a scene where tenderness and violence circle each other without resolution.

His images hover in a threshold state, where desire is tangled with fracture and intimacy becomes a form of haunting. If Matney’s Shards mined the archive, Dudik performed history, and Wu opened dream, Rouse staged the psyche itself - its collisions of longing and fear, its metamorphic capacity to become other in the act of looking.

Conclusion: Photography as Passage, Exhibition as Threshold

Taken together, these four artists made photography the exhibition’s connective tissue: a medium of fragments, revenants, and unstable time. Their works did not offer closure but suspension, refusing the comfort of a single narrative. Each image asked the viewer to linger - in the archive, in history, in reverie, in the body - before imagining return.

If painting and sculpture in The Task That Is the Toil carried the weight of myth and allegory, photography supplied its shadows and mirrors. It reminded us that emergence is never a clean exit but a continual act of re-entry: looking again, remembering again, assembling shards into something we can live with, even if never whole.