Christian Patterson
Join artist Christian Patterson as he discusses his long-form, novelistic projects and how they take shape as books and installations.
Film/Video Theater
We’re thrilled to join Ohio State’s Department of Art in welcoming Patterson, whose works have been described as “subjective documentary of the historical past” by the New York Times.
Photography lies at the heart of Patterson’s work, which also includes archival ephemera, drawings, hand-painted signs, monoprints, readymades, shotgun blasts, telephones, and televisions. Patterson’s layered, multiyear projects most often play with archives, authorship, memory, place, and time. His projects have included a five-year investigative retracing of a true crime story; an irreverent, semi-biographical study of his hometown; and a memento mori (a symbolic warning of death) to a grocery store created over a 20-year period. Stay after the talk for a Q&A with Patterson.
“His work... collapses time. It’s not about when a thing happened, but how it reverberates— in texture, in colour, in loose metaphor.”
About the Artist
Christian Patterson is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with photography, books, and installation. His books include Redheaded Peckerwood, Bottom of the Lake, and Gong Co. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, New York Public Library Picture Collection Fellow, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee. His work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, and Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as many institutional artist-book collections. He was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and lives in New York City, where he periodically collaborates with artists in his garage.