TOBACCO BARN | REBEKAH TEAGUE

The board at 580 Case is an exterior art site that commissions local and national artists to create work specifically for the site. Accessible 24-hours a day, TOBACCO BARN is on view through February.

Rebekah Teague was born and raised and is getting old in the states bordering the Mississippi River. She grew up in Arkansas where her father gave her his Minolta XG-A when she was a teenager. She right away started photographing everything, beginning with the scenes and people of her local hills and roads. 20+ years later, she continues to see the benefit of photographing everything, a substitution for memory and mythology.

“My paternal grandmother was born near and spent years of her young childhood around Hopkinsville, Kentucky before she moved to Arkansas during the Depression. The timeline is unclear to me and my uncle, her son, said that she was not opposed to prevarication. I spent a few weeks in early January 2023 in an artist’s residency in Tennessee and spent time visiting areas around Tennessee, seeing places I’d been and places I hadn’t. I lived in Kentucky for a few years in my 20s but only imagined Hopkinsville, never visited. I planned a route through Hopkinsville to look around and invent some memories my grandmother may have had.While driving through the country outside of Hopkinsville, I saw this perfect tobacco barn floating in a misty field. My grandmother started smoking very young and smoked her entire life. This scene brought to mind the smells of tobacco warehouses in Lexington, hiding my grandmother’s cigarettes when I was young, drinking out of snuff glasses, and a time extinguished."

Rebekah Teague currently lives a few blocks from the Mississippi River in Minneapolis where she uses small, medium and large format cameras and prints in her darkroom at home. This photo was taken with a medium format camera and the negative printed as a silver gelatin print in Teague’s home darkroom.