Redheaded Peckerwood
Christian Patterson
MACK
English
Essays by Luc Sante and Karen Irvine.
Hardcover with loose illustrated booklet and a facsimile postcard.
168 pages
190 x 240 mm
2013
ISBN 9781907946141
Redheaded Peckerwood is a work with a tragic underlying narrative – the story of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate who murdered ten people, including Fugate’s family, during a three-day killing spree across Nebraska to the point of their capture in Douglas, Wyoming. The images record places and things central to the story, depict ideas inspired by it, and capture other moments and discoveries along the way. From a technical perspective, the photographs incorporate and reference the techniques of photojournalism, forensic photography, image appropriation, reenactment and documentary landscape photography. On a conceptual level, they deal with a charged landscape and play with a photographic representation and truth as the work deconstructs a pre-existing narrative.
Redheaded Peckerwood also utilizes and plays with a pre-existing archive of material, deliberately mixing fact and fiction, past and present, myth and reality as it presents, expands and re-presents the various facts and theories surrounding this story. While photographs are the heart of this work, they are the complemented and informed by documents and objects that belonged to the killers and their victims – including a map, poem, confession letter, stuffed animal, hood ornament and various other items, in several cases, these materials are discoveries first made by the artist and presented here for the first time.
(Source: christianpatterson.com/redheaded-peckerwood-info/)
About the Artist
CHRISTIAN PATTERSON is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with photography, books, and installation. His work has been described as novelistic, subjective documentary of the historical past, and it often deals with themes of the archive, authorship, memory, place and time. Photographs are the heart of Patterson’s work, which has also included archival ephemera, drawings, hand-painted signs, readymade objects, sound, and video.
He was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and lives in New York City.
christianpatterson.com
(Source: christianpatterson.com/bio-cv/)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent publisher of award-winning books on contemporary art, critical theory, film and architecture. We work with pioneering creative minds and institutions across the globe and pride ourselves on the rigour and care that goes into every stage of the book-making process.
mackbooks.eu/
(Source: mackbooks.eu/pages/about-mack)
