HOK Gallery is proud to be haunted by the ghosts, specters, and an ever-vanishing iconography of signs, fetishes, and gestures from America’s South. Captured in black & white photographs by self-confessed outsider-looking-in, Tav Falco of the avant-garde rockabilly band Panther Burns.
With his Panther Burns, Tav Falco has been scorching a wild trail across the world ever since their devastatingly primitive debut album Behind the Magnolia Curtain in 1981. A little earlier, Tav Falco’s name first came to the international musical and artistic connoisseurs’ eye with a mystery mentioning among the credits on the sleeve of Alex Chilton’s 1980 album Like Flies On Sherbert. The caption read: “Titling: Gustavo Falco” and had him in excellent professional company, for it directly followed William Eggleston’s credits for “Photography/Video”. Not that Tav Falco in any way followed in Eggleston’s footsteps by exploring color photography as an artistic medium. With Tav Falco it’s all black & white. Even when venturing into movie making, with his 2017 feature film Urania Descending, black and white to him is the only possibility. “Color would have killed it.” The same goes for his photographs.
An Iconography Of Chance is a psycho-iconography of the gothic South in pictures with captioned intertext of the urban specters, rural fables, and visual clichés that have made the American south a netherworld of dreams and a necropolis of terrors. Illumination of darkness is the only perfection. But bourgeois realism is not the issue here. It is an expression of delirium that Tav Falco is after.
This booklet is the second of IN HOK publication series. It contains Tav Falco's never before published manifesto: Photographing in the South. Accompanied by photographs and more!
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About IN HOK publications: HOK is a tiny, intimate art space in The Hague (The Netherlands). HOK is going for the limit; distorting art, preferably on the edge of against-the-grain underground pop culture. Music, film, comics, or women’s magazines: nothing wrong with transgressing a few boundaries now and then. Each exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition publication, dedicated to that one artist.
