Gong Co. is 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 — an unintentional time capsule and 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 disintegration, through its decline, death, and decay. 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, and continued his work in the studio until 2023.
As both book and exhibition, Gong Co. invites readers to engage in a visceral and visual exploration.
The book is presented as an aged and worn green, clothbound cover wrapped in a brown paper jacket resembling a grocery sack. Its fore edge appears foxed and molded; its inner pages appear to age, fox, and yellow as the book progresses. Its content is an eclectic mix of on-site and studio photographs, monotypes, trompe l’oeil collages, and cryptic handwritten notes.
As a more traditional exhibition, Gong Co. is a presented as a mix of photographs in walnut frames, monotypes in handcrafted cardboard frames, and a mix of products and objects carefully placed around the exhibition space.
As a more immersive installation, the store space is recreated and re-presented utilizing the store door, front counter, fixtures, furniture, clocks, telephones, a television, realistic scenography and thousands of products and objects from Gong Co.
The work is many things, all at once. A reflection on 20th-century America. All we bought, and all we left behind. The changing of the economic landscape, and the disappearance of small businesses. The fading away of the “American dream.” An exploration of how we engage with the artistic representation of “the South” — a place shaped in popular imagination by artists and writers including William Eggleston, Walker Evans, and William Faulkner. But perhaps more than anything, Gong Co. is an existential allegory, a work about impermanence and a now long-outworn sense of America itself.