DAISY PATTON
TO HELP YOU REMEMBER ME
J. Rinehart Gallery announces our exhibition of embellished portraits of women by artist and painter Daisy Patton. Her collection of works in To Help You Remember Me are a continuation of her on-going series Forgetting is so long, an investigation into how we present ourselves and how that communications shifts across time. To Help You Remember Me will be on view online and in the gallery, April 17 – May 22, 2021.
The title of the exhibition, To Help You Remember Me, comes from an inscription written on the back of one of Daisy Patton’s found photographs. Once the images are enlarged to life-scale, each portrait takes on a new life.
Portraits of women embellished with flowers, vines and bold color make up the entirety of the exhibition. Viewers are invited to sit in communion with the women depicted, navigating the likeness of painting and the fleeting exactitude of photography.
What does it feel like to look at someone again directly, to see them present again as they look back at you? This exchange of gazes, looking across time and space, is meant to unsettle the ways we think about ourselves, those who came before us, and the performative ways we try to display ourselves to others.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a digital catalog will be published with an essay written by arts writer and curator Emily Zimmerman.
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To Help You Remember Me is an exploration of portraits of women from the on-going series Forgetting is so long. It investigates how we present ourselves to our families, our larger communities, and how that communication shifts across time. Through the combined photograph and painting, the work is an invitation to sit in communion with the women depicted, navigating the likeness of painting and the fleeting exactitude of photography. What does it feel like to look at someone again directly, to see them present again as they look back at you? This exchange of gazes, looking across time and space, is meant to unsettle the ways we think about ourselves, those who came before us, and the performative ways we try to display ourselves to others.
Who do we choose to remember, and how? These ideas are fraught terrain that cross family relationships, identities, and collective memorialization. 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.
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Daisy Patton received an Honors BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University. Patton received the Montague Travel Grant for research in Dresden, Germany, and has completed numerous artist residencies at Minerva Projects, Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. Her works have been exhibited widely throughout the US and 2018 marked her first museum exhibition at CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado.