Friday, Jul 15, 2022 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

River’s Dream is Curran Hatleberg’s complete realization of the series exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Hatleberg is known for traveling America, guided by intuition, to create scenes of American life and landscape. Working collaboratively with the people he meets, he recounts intimate stories of family and community. Here, Hatleberg centers his narrative on the dog days of summer. Sweltering heat, dripping humidity, lush vegetation, and screaming insects– River’s Dream is a pulsing and episodic hallucination of life lived outdoors. In these sixty-five photographs, we move through swamps and groves, front yards and junkyards, encountering moments of haunting mystery and beautiful impermanence. Heightened by formal repetition, echo, and refrain, everyday scenes take on surreal, allegorical qualities. In the end, Hatleberg leaves us with the impression of memory, where the past is never gone, but appears and reappears endlessly, as in the flickering of a dream.

To pre-order copy a SIGNED copy of River’s Dream by Curran Hatleberg

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Contact High by D’Angelo Lovell Williams offers an expansive engagement with the visualization of desire and depiction of the Black body. Williams’s narrative images reflect the many forms in which Black queer people exist and have existed historically within each other’s lives, picturing them as sitters, lovers, caregivers, or shadows. Williams’s work is guided by their life experience and an interrogation of their own perspective, as well as wider questions around the representation of race, class, sexuality, gender, and intimacy. The title Contact High references the importance of touch and gesture in Williams‘s work, and alludes to heightened senses and intuitive movement.

From self-portraits to collaborations with community, Williams’s photographs visualize the Black body in performative scenes that are theatrical, dance-like, and occasionally mundane, pointing towards collective histories and Black ancestral practices. At the heart of these intimate, dialogic images are notions of kinship and spirituality interweaved with quietly political and radical gestures. Williams’s unfaltering gaze insists on visibility and deference, and creates scenes in which Black and queer voices are the authority. The dynamics that play out between families, cultures, friends, lovers, ancestors and descendants are visualized as a spectrum of care, tenderness, and vulnerability, speaking to the nuances of our complex lives often overlooked by historical depictions.

 

To pre-order copy a SIGNED copy of Contact High by D’Angelo Lovell Williams

 

Images courtesy of the artists and Higher Pictures Generation