Opening Reception: Swannanoan Silt

Join Buncombe County Special Collections for an opening reception for the Swannanoan Silt photography exhibit by local filmmaker Isaac King. This event will take place on Tuesday, August 5, 6:00 - 7:30 pm in the BCSC Reading Room, with complimentary refreshments provided and the artist in attendance. 

The exhibition will run from June 25 - September 30. King's photographs will be donated to the Special Collections archives after the exhibition.

Additional programming includes a film screening on September 20, 2025. 

Swannanoan Silt is presented as part of the Carolina Record Shop and the community memory project Come Hell or High Water, documenting the historic impact of Helene on Western North Carolina. 

About Swannanoan Silt

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene wreaked catastrophic damage in North Carolina, including the small town of Swannanoa which, according to their fire chief Anthony Penland, experienced “total devastation.”

The photographs presented in this exhibition consist of nine 5”x7” gelatin silver prints selected from a series of 35mm black & white reversal slides. The slides comprise one channel of the larger Swannanoan Silt moving image installation and performance, which has screened in numerous venues throughout North Carolina. However, this exhibit at the Buncombe County Special Collections Reading Room is the first time any of these photographs have been presented to the public as printed media.

The images serve as a direct engagement with Tropical Storm Helene’s ecological impact, as the original rolls of film were developed using water from the contaminated French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers in the immediate months after the storm. As such, the images take on visual artifacts and damage borne from their contact with the same water that destroyed the landscape depicted therein.

The primary goal of Swannanoan Silt has always been to highlight the perseverance, radical empathy, and dedication to one another in our mountain communities despite such adversity brought forth by social and ecological crisis. 

About the Artist

Isaac King (b. 2001) is a visual media artist and filmmaker born and raised in South Carolina. His practice centers around handmade cinema, recycled cinema, and amateur filmmaking and prominently utilizes celluloid film, taking full advantage of its materiality. His work and research have included and focused on matters of representation and socio-ecological metamorphosis, particularly in the United States South. 

As someone who was directly impacted by Helene, Isaac takes his role in representing our community’s recollection of the disaster very seriously. In part, Swannanoan Silt has been his coping outlet, and he hopes his skills as an image maker also help his neighbors feel seen and understood. This project has been an effort to counter extractivist narratives and platform fellow Appalachians who often get left out of the national conversation.