Christian Patterson

Christian Patterson

Fellow: Awarded 2013
Field of Study: Photography

Competition: US & Canada

Christian Patterson (born Fond du Lac, Wisconsin) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is a self-taught artist.

Photographs are the heart of Patterson’s work but they are often complemented and informed by other mediums. This is done to create a more immersive, multidimensional experience, and to expand narrative potential and interpretive possibilities.

Patterson’s first work, Sound Affects (2002–2005), explores Memphis, Tennessee, as a musical place through visual arrangements of light, color, rhythm, and form. In this work, photographs serve as visual analogues to sound and music and are sometimes exhibited with musical accompaniment. The work has been exhibited internationally and was published as a monograph in 2008.

Patterson’s second work, Redheaded Peckerwood (2005–2011), utilizes a true crime story as a spine and functions as a visual crime dossier—a cryptic collection of clues for the viewer to decipher. This work utilizes a multitude of photographic techniques to tell anew a tragic story from the past and is exhibited with documents and objects related to the story.

Redheaded Peckerwood was published by MACK in 2011 to international critical acclaim, nominated for the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, and won the prestigious 2012 Recontres d’Arles Author Book Award.

With his forthcoming work, Patterson continues on this course—working with new subject matter, exploiting photographic conventions, striving to expand photographic perception, and finding new ways to tell stories visually.

Patterson’s work is exhibited and collected internationally. He is represented by Rose Gallery (Santa Monica) and Robert Morat Galerie (Hamburg/Berlin).

 

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