Jardine Libaire & Phyllis B. Dooney

Join us for a reading, presentation, and book signing of Gravity Is Stronger Here. Award-winning photographer Phyllis B. Dooney and critically acclaimed writer Jardine Libaire will present their creative nonfiction montage made from photographs, short films, and docu-poems about looking for America in America.

Wednesday, June 28th, 6:30 – 8pm at Women & Their Work Gallery

In 2011, Dooney visited Greenville, Mississippi, starting a five-year-long documentary project featuring Halea Brown, an openly gay woman, and her dynamic Southern family. The Browns dream out loud while fighting the silent undertow of poverty and recurrent domestic narratives. In the cinematic and ambiguous photographs and in the poems constructed from interview transcripts the participants are candid about addiction, love, the military, domestic abuse, money, gay life, religion, loyalty, conspiracies, and freedom.

The book presents us with a place where love for a gay daughter and an Evangelical love of God can exist in one mother, violence and tenderness in the same relationship, and hope and hopelessness in the same daily life. Gravity upholds this constellation of truths by creating a prismatic portrait of the Browns.

Gravity Is Stronger Here was awarded Honorable Mention by The Center for Documentary Studies’ Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize in 2016 and will be on exhibition in the 2017 LightField Festival of Photography & Multimedia Art in Hudson, NY.