Somewhere Someone
By Cynthia Daignault and Curran Hatleberg. Poem by John Ashbery.
Hassla Books. NY, NY. 2017.
Hardcover. 80 pages. Accordion Fold. Book design by Vance Wellenstein.
First Edition. Numbered edition of 500.

Hassla Books is delighted to present Somewhere Someone, a new artist book, documenting the first collaborative work by painter Cynthia Daignault and photographer Curran Hatleberg. As a couple living on opposite coasts, they contemplated absence and the broad reality of the land between New York and Los Angeles: America. In 2015, they decided to get into their cars and set out toward each other. They left at the same moment, took the same route, stayed in the same motels, and used identical cameras to record their crossings. As planned, they met at the geographic center of America, Lebanon Kansas, before continuing on alone. The resulting work, Somewhere Someone, is a document that happening, a series of 160 black and white photographs. Here, the work is reproduced here as an 80-page accordion book that pairs their moments as Daignault moved east and Hatleberg west. Centrally, it is a work about the solitude of subjectivity; consciousness is akin to the driver, alone in their car moving down a desolate highway. Two people might pass all the same landmarks, but will never see the same things. Moreover, the book is a portrait of our contemporaneous experience of America. As we live increasingly through windshields and screens, we speed along a randomized image stream, straining to find meaning in the incidental. Land, love, and daylight are fleeting and yet, those brief moments of overlap seem of outsized importance. Daignault and Hatleberg suggest that narrative is not constructed from a trajectory of compelling frames, but rather from the transient point when two such paths intersect--an unremarkable cornfield in Kansas. 

Cynthia Daignault is an artist living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Daignault received a BA from Stanford University, California. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at FLAG Art Foundation New York; Lisa Cooley, New York; and White Columns, New York, NY. Her works have been included in many major museum exhibitions, including shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Fort Worth Modern, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Her next solo show will open September 2017 at Sunday Painter, London.

Curran Hatleberg is a photographer living and working in Baltimore, MD. He has traveled the United States extensively to photograph over the last ten years. Hatleberg received his MFA from Yale University. He has had numerous exhibitions, notably at Higher Pictures and Fraenkel Gallery. Hatleberg is the recipient of a Magnum Emergency Fund and an Aaron Siskind Grant. His photographs are included in a number of private and public collections, including the Center for Contemporary Photography, the Yale University Museum of Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University.

Somewhere Someone will be released at the New York Art Book Fair, September 21, 2017. Hassla Books will host a book signing at the fair on Friday September 22, 2017,

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