Tuesday Edition: Hollis Brown Thornton

Osiris Mountain by Hollis Brown Thornton
8"x10" ($20) | 11"x14" ($50) | 16"x20" ($200) | 24"x30" ($1000)

Happy-first-day-back-in-the-office-after-a-loooong-weekend, collectors. If the return to the real world has been difficult, I just might have the salve for what ails you—a trip back in time. We're flashing way past the last 72+ hours of relaxing and celebrating—Hollis Brown Thornton-style—to the late 1980s, with his new print: Osiris Mountain.

First, a short visit to recent 20x200 history. When Jen first brought you his work in February 2010, she wrote:

VHS and Closing Credits at the End of the Movie from Hollis Brown Thornton (I found him on the internet, oh yes, I did!) offer a kinder, gentler nostalgia-tinged escape into other realms. In his statement, Brown (as he prefers to be called) writes about how our reality shifts as our present becomes our past, and the media he's depicted—video cassettes and on-screen space invaders—reference our progression towards an increasingly digital and virtual future.

We followed up with a new print later that year—just in time for holiday gift-giving*—when I introduced you to Atari, created from a permanent-marker-on-paper drawing of the infamous game cartridges:

Brown's collected and compiled dozens of cartridges to compose Atari. His marker-mellowed rendering of the games that defined our not-too-distant past documents ever-changing technology and culture, nourishing our collective nostalgia for simpler times. In the details they reveal their past lives and loves—once owned by Tom Regan, affectionately worn at the edges—evidence of good use. Like the tapes in Brown's VHS and the space invaders in Closing Credits at the End of the Movie, the cartridges in Atari are seemingly stacked against technological singularity.

I'll leave you now to revel in time travel and unpack the elements of Osiris Mountain.

* Psst: it's never too early to start your Christmas shopping!

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