Higher Pictures presents River’s Dream 2010-2020 by Curran Hatleberg, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. For the first time, the complete opus of sixty-five photographs is on view. Emerging from the photographer’s sustained presence in the South-Eastern United States, River’s Dream narrates the turbulent and unresolved coexistence of human and non-human life; the encroachment of heat, water, and vegetation on the built environment; economic precarity; and a possibility of connection across political and social differences.
Installed together, the photographs allow these themes to accumulate and echo across the gallery walls. An encounter with a reptile in one frame finds its counterpart in a figure at rest in another, while recurring motifs of water, overgrowth, and decay link people, animals, and place into a single ecosystem. The scale of the presentation mirrors the scale of Hatleberg’s commitment, a project built over a decade of return visits and personal relationships.
Curran Hatleberg, Untitled (Screen Door), 2019 - Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.