For months Now Olivia [Our Museum Director] and Mary [our Museum Registrar] have been working on curating the upcoming exhibition, Patricia Patterson: Here and There Back and Forth. Every Thursday at 9:30 a.m. they meet at Patterson’s house to discuss and work on the exhibition. To give you all a peek into this process and Patterson’s home, I snuck into last Thursday’s meeting to take some pictures of Patricia’s house and Studio. It is an amazing place, every artist should be envious of her studio. Above are some pictures of my visit; below is a brief statement on the exhibition to wet your appetites.
Patricia Patterson: Here and There Back and Forth
Opening date: February 12, 2011
This exhibition will attempt to summarize a lifetime of artist Patricia Patterson’s work. Patterson, a nationally recognized and locally based artist and University of California, San Diego professor emeritus, creates theatrical installations and sumptuously painted snapshots that provide a visual account of facets of domestic and outdoor life on Inishmore (one of the Aran Islands located off the western coast of Ireland) and her home in Southern California.
Born and raised on the East Coast, Patterson studied at Parsons School of Design in New York before embarking on an adventure that would steer the course of her artistic career. At the age of nineteen she read J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands, and soon found herself on the island of Inishmore. Patterson was instantly captivated by the island, and set plans to return a year later after finishing her degree at Parsons. Upon her return to Inishmore, she spent the next two years immersing herself in an “ever changing spectacle” of land, sky, water, and language. Patterson found a craggy, rugged terrain and difficult living conditions that provided a sharp contrast to the warm and generous character of the people she met. Since this original visit, Patterson has returned to the island a dozen times for extended sojourns. These experiences serve as the origin to a life’s work that offers a series of individual glimpses into the lives of others like scenes from a film that define a set of characters and places of daily life—an everyday theatre. At the core, Patterson makes art about “ordinary things,” a subject matter that is, as she puts it, “…tricky…Using domestic material is risky; it can seem too sentimental, too intimate.”
