BOOK LAUNCH + POP-UP EXHIBITION
Clay Mills
Filter Photo is pleased to present a book launch and pop-up exhibition by Clay Mills, on the occassion of the release of his publication Heaven's Like a Frat Party, You Just Gotta Know Someone by Ephemere Tokyo. Copies of the publication will be for sale, and the artist will be exhibiting a selection of newer works not included in the publication. This event is presented in conjunction with West Town First Fridays.
"Heaven's Like a Frat Party, You Just Gotta Know Someone compiles pictures I’ve taken between 2019 to 2022.
These are primarily pictures of my friends and places we’ve spent time in. Repetition of people and the movement across a brief period of time gives one the impression that these photos follow a singular gang of boys romping across a haunted America — the world’s been left behind yet they must live on.
Often in these pictures my friends are only looking. They’re permitted to observe but never alter. Soon their youth will disappear, and the static world they haunt will survive them.
These photos are precious and funny and evil to me, they’re doorways to a memory of a life I did not myself live. My photos could perhaps be called “youth photos,” if that description is adequate to what Baudelaire tasked us with: to capture, “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life… often weird, violent, and excessive.”
—Clay Mills
About the Artist
Clay Mills is a filmmaker, photographer and writer originally from Texas, now based in Chicago.
Clay photographs modernity, taking pictures of the “ugly” as if it was “beautiful.” His photos have been derided by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Curator of Photography as “like Cartier-Bresson taking the decisive moment, but [instead] taking the indecisive moment.”
Clay's hope is that his work is adequate to what Baudelaire tasked us with: to capture, “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life… often weird, violent, and excessive.”