Bottom of the Lake (2013-2015)

Call the Bottom of the Lake. 414-921-0393.

In Bottom of the Lake, Christian Patterson takes an allusive view of his hometown, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, assembling pieces of a puzzle he never attempts to solve. Throughout, geographical details (snow-covered taverns, a deserted lakefront) are shuffled among images of pitted concrete, cinder-block walls, and nearly abstract expanses of wood grain and snow. Those taverns are the only suggestion of autobiography here; Patterson thanks “Wisconsin beer, Mom and Dad,” but seems less interested in his wasted youth (or remembered conviviality?) than the texture of a place that’s now mostly a state of mind.

– Vince Aletti

Christian Patterson was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1972; so, too, was his family’s Wisconsin telephone directory, which would eventually become the source material for Bottom of the Lake. Patterson and the phone book have both lived something close to typical lives; just as Patterson has presumably aged according to the general maturation schema that most humans follow, so has the telephone book fulfilled its ontogenetic expectations: For some brief period it was used heavily, during which time it was appended with mindless notes, doodles, and other marginalia; and then it outlasted its usefulness and was thrown away, to be replaced by updated volumes. Now, however, Patterson has resuscitated his family’s telephone book, reprinting each page and all of its handmade annotations; whatever materials he found within it have made it into his new book. But he also inserts some new material of his own: photographs, drawings, cut-and-pasted messages. The result is a uniquely personal portrait of a place, full of messages whose purposes are forgotten or remain obtuse to the viewer, but nonetheless carry the modest weight of a now-unrecoverable meaning. In reviving his phone book from a typical death, he may have done something close to securing his own immortality.

– Benjamin Gottlieb, The Brooklyn Rail

Bottom of the Lake is not a story about returning home, instead it speaks to transformations in vision and point of view as one evolves as a person. Patterson notes, “I now see Fond du Lac through a strange prism with many different sides – the faded, hazy views of a native, a son, a child, an adolescent and a teenager; the clearer, more discerning eyes of an adult; and now, I hope, the more perceptive gaze of an artist. I guess that gaze is more than just one side of the prism; it is the prism itself.”

– Lisa Sutcliffe, Curator of Photographs at Milwaukee Art Museum, in conversation with Christian Patterson