Thursday, Oct 19, 2023 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

What began for me in 2014 as a photographic survey of the idiosyncratic architecture of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) houses in the Utah–Arizona border town of Short Creek, developed into a greater story about a tight-knit group of once displaced teenagers navigating their fall from grace. The Crick is a meditation on religious succession, patriarchal systems, zealotry, fraternity, ecology, post-colonialism, and the legacy of Manifest Destiny in the world built by these young cast-outs. While many Southerners pronounce creek as crick, the title of this work is specifically derived from a phonetic spelling used by the locals of Short Creek.I think of The Crick as a call to unity during this era of polarization, an opportunity to experience the beauty, fallibility, and humanity of this idiosyncratic brotherhood. The subjects of these photographs inhabit a unique space in the desert expanses and open skies of the American West, suspended in a liminal tension between hell and paradise. I hope that the photographs offer a bridge between our world and theirs.

To pre-order a SIGNED copy of The Crick by Jim Mangan