Game, set and match: the recent histories of art and tennis told through new photo book

The stories of art and the 20th Century history of tennis conflate in Forest Hills , the new book by artist Bill Sullivan, published by S_U_N_. Forming a new kind of history, Bill presents the rise and fall of Forest Hills, which was once the centre of American tennis and now represents a lost civilisation or forgotten world. Told through a mix of photography and image making, the book parallels this story with that of art and design, and the themes of erosion, fading, white-washing and nostalgia. It follows the evolution of the stadium and surrounding site through various changes to its surfaces, and eventually to its end. Both ahistorical and historical, Forest Hills documents a real place, over a real time and brings form to the question of how and what we remember.

The New York-based artist has long been interested in the contrasts and crossovers between fact and fiction. Whether that has been conveyed through visual experiments with light and black and white photography; or in his conceptual work, where for over a decade he concentrated on a body of artwork that chronicled the evolution of fictional lost European art movement, Das Blaue Auto.