Brook Hsu

Nostalghia recounts Brook Hsu’s 2022-2023 untitled site-specific exhibition at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis in Rome. Two years after the completion of the project, Hsu attempts to hold a sustained farewell to her artwork using a mixture of writing and photography. From Piero della Francesca, Blinky Palermo and Hsu’s childhood garden to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jun’Ichiro Tanizaki’s toilet and a video store in Kansas City that’s going out of business, Nostalghia brings together an eclectic band of Hsu’s influences to tell a story of both loss and becoming. “In a moment when I thought that no greater companion would be my loneliness and my sadness, I
am met with company. Not even I understood until it happened to me. In darkness, I sat smoking, letting my thoughts go. Against the night, a form was made a silhouette on a railing...” Making a quiet plea for the imagination, Nostalghia carries a sense across its pages that sometimes the parts that make up a whole are not always as linear as they might appear. Included within the monograph are photographs by Hsu, Alessandro Cicoria, Valeria Giampetro and David Regen.

 

Brook Hsu lives and works in New York and Wyoming. She is known for using an array of materials, including ink, oil paint, industrial carpets, and off-cuts of ready-made lumber. The sources for Hsu’s imagery come from her own observations, sometimes arising from art history, film, and literature. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and writing, she produces abstract and figurative works that employ a host of signs and motifs, recounting stories of love, pain, and humor.

 

Mundus Press was established in 2021 and is run by sisters Emma and Charlotte Kohlmann. Based in Western Massachusetts, this press aims to garner a community through publishing by working with artists, writers and those who are creative without vocation. “Mundus” can be traced to Etruscan and Latin roots and can be defined as “womb and world”, “the universe and its inhabitants”, and “to keep time”. This homonym encompasses both the mammoth and the minuscule parts of life that are indispensable - a fitting association for a press that does not want to harbor any kind of idea or criteria.

 

Softcover

6.75 x 9.5 inches (17.14 x 24.13 cm) 

100 pages / 57 images

ISBN 979-8-89619-910-6