Friday, Dec 13, 2024 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Christian Patterson’s Gong Co., a monumental memento mori to the decline and decay of a family-owned grocery store in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, from which the book takes its name. When Patterson first encountered the store in 2003, it was still open for business but seemingly stuck in time, its shelves scattered with long-expired products. It was like an unintentional time capsule, and an uncanny fulfillment of Andy Warhol’s prophecy that “Someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” Over the next twenty years, Patterson diligently documented the store's slow disintegration. In 2013, its doors were closed, with its contents left inside. Patterson continued to access the store until the day it was gutted in late 2019. Gong Co.invites readers to engage in a visceral and visual exploration. Through Patterson’s eclectic mix of on-site and studio photographs, monotypes, trompe l’oeil collages, and cryptic handwritten notes, the book becomes a dynamic and multi-layered experience. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades or Dieter Roth’s Flacher Abfall (Flat Waste) come to mind, where everyday objects are transformed into art through context and presentation. The book offers endless opportunities for interpretation. The book format acts as a sculptural work in itself. Patterson has crafted an artist book object, presented as an aged and worn green, clothbound cover wrapped in a brown paper jacket resembling a grocery sack. Each page is a testament to Patterson’s meticulous attention to detail, incorporating elements such as mold and foxing marks, as if caused by heavy southern humidity, now forever embedded into the book's pages.  Gong Co. is a profound exploration of how we engage with the artistic representation of America and “the South”—a place shaped in popular imagination by great photographers and writers like William Eggleston, Walker Evans, William Faulkner, and Harper Lee. But Patterson delves more deeply into the impermanence of it all; and of a now long-outworn sense of America itself.

What the Rain Might Bring, is the first monograph by photographer Dylan Hausthor. 
Inspired by David Arora’s mushroom identification guide, Hausthor’s large-format black-and-white photographs explore the rich interplay between human, plant, and animal realms delving into themes of storytelling, faith, folklore, and the inherent queerness of nature. The images evoke a sense of pagan, Wiccan, religious, anarchic, and mystic rituals, offering a visual exploration that is at once candid and full of hidden secrets.
 

Multimedia artist TR Ericsson reimagines personal family photographs in his deeply moving book, Nicotine. To create the artworks, Ericsson employs a unique process that involves passing nicotine through a halftone silkscreen, resulting in a ghostly imprint of an image. The resulting prints are as much about the haunting presence of the past manifested in photographs as they are about memory’s ephemeral nature.
A lifelong smoker, Ericsson’s mother, Sue, would often stay up late into the night at her dining table, cigarette in hand. After her death by suicide in 2003, Ericsson was faced with the task of cleaning her home and its nicotine-stained walls. This experience served as the catalyst for the creation of the nicotine works. As Ericsson scraped the wallpaper, he thought not just of the physical stains but of his mother herself—alone, up all night, ruminating over her past.


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