River’s dream

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. These rural, out-of-the-way places are often overlooked until an election rolls around, when politicians weaponize a region’s economic insecurity, racial and ethnic demographics, and attitudes towards gender and sexuality to win votes. Rather than constructing a sociological portrait of a region, Hatleberg reaches for something deeper, a personal connection, a mutual exchange: “I believe photographing people forces an interest in lives other than our own, allowing an opportunity to see ourselves reflected in someone else. Biases, judgements, and stereotypes fall away in the face of vivid experience.” River’s dream offers viewers the same invitation: to spend time, rather than pass through, and to encounter the American South through careful attention.