Gong Co.

TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey are pleased to present 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.