Uncovered Spaces Participating Artist Daisy Patton
Untitled (May 15 1933), 2017 oil on archival print mounted to panel 80 x 102 in
Artist Statement
Who do we choose to remember, and how? These ideas are fraught terrain that cross family relationships, identities, and collective memorialization. For some, living memory supports an elongation of our lives—we only succumb to a blank past when our histories are no longer recalled and held by those that once cared for us. A family photograph is such a vessel of retrieving memory. As time accumulates, however, these emotionally laden images become unknowable, missing their necessary translators. Despite this gradual disintegration of previous selves, our bodies are still affected by the actions of our ancestors. Their lives are encoded into our beings through often-complex interconnections, whether through epigenetics or other practices preserved through time. The inherent loss embedded in these discarded photographs is intertwined with the fragility of the body itself. The depicted bodies can both reveal and conceal embodied language, personality, as well as emotional and physical health. These ties to corporeality and lineages hold us in ways that can manifest as a tender embrace or even suffocation.
In Forgetting is so long, I collect abandoned family photographs, enlarge them to life-size, and paint over them as a kind of re-enlivening, removing the individuals from their formerly static location and time. Family photographs are revered vestiges to their loved ones, but if they become unmoored, the images and people within become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing sacred objects forces a “shock into being.” Suddenly, we perceive them as present and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I seek to lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into a loving act of remembrance. Bright swathes of color and the use of painted floral patterns underline relationships and connections to the natural world and beyond, adorning and embellishing these relics with devotional marks of care. These nearly forgotten people are transfigured and “reborn” into a fantastical, liminal place that holds both beauty and joy, temporarily suspended from plunging fully into oblivion.
Biography
Daisy Patton is a multi-disciplinary artist who was born in Los Angeles, CA, to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. She spent her childhood between California and Oklahoma, deeply affected by these conflicting cultural ways of being. Influenced by collective and political histories, as well as memory and the fallibility of the body, Patton’s work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, relationship, connection, storytelling and story-carrying.
Currently residing in western Massachusetts, Patton has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including a museum solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado, the Chautauqua Institution, Spring/Break NYC, the Katonah Museum of Art, the Fulginitti Pavilion at the Center for Bioethics at the Anschutz Medical Campus, among others. She has paintings held in public and private collections such as the Denver Art Museum, Fidelity Investments Art Collection, and Delta Airlines. Patton’s work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, Transition Magazine, The Denver Post, The Chautauquan Daily, The Seattle Met, and more. Minerva Projects Press has published Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton, a book with essays and poetry on Patton’s practice spring 2021.
Patton has completed artist residencies at Minerva Projects, Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has been awarded the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, as well as the Assets for Artists Massachusetts Matched Savings grant and the Montage Travel Award from SMFA for research in Dresden, Germany. She earned an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program, and a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver, CO, and J. Rinehart represents her in Seattle, WA.
For more information:
Daisy Patton Website
K Contemporary Art
J. Rinehart Gallery
@daisy_patton