Grear Patterson

A former member of The Still House Group, American artist Grear Patterson focuses on stark contemporary language and its visual surrogates, a nowadays dictionary made up of winking and frowning emoticons distilled and reshuffled into ambiguous ciphers. These impenetrable hieroglyphs are countered by expressive images almost overflowing with romanticized nostalgia for lost innocence and childhood rituals. He plumbs the pleasures and traumas of...

A former member of The Still House Group, American artist Grear Patterson focuses on stark contemporary language and its visual surrogates, a nowadays dictionary made up of winking and frowning emoticons distilled and reshuffled into ambiguous ciphers. These impenetrable hieroglyphs are countered by expressive images almost overflowing with romanticized nostalgia for lost innocence and childhood rituals. He plumbs the pleasures and traumas of adolescence in photographs, videos, paintings and sculptures that evoke both personal and collective rites of passage. His work, alternating between disclosure and reticence, subtly explores not only the immediacy of reckless experience, violent impulses and erotic yearning, but the often halting emotional and linguistic shorthand used to express those furtive memories and desires.

Patterson is constantly photographing his surroundings. Depictions of houses (some random, some of friends and family’s, others for aesthetic value), details of landscapes: a close up of a wheat field, a lonesome volleyball court on the beach and nature, objects lying around, from toys and books on a shelf, to things seen on the sidewalk, Patterson’s work is about keeping memories, holding on to fleeting moments and being able to relive them through the memorializing process of art making. Furthermore, they engage the viewer by acknowledging the increasing universality of our experience, and thus our collective memories. Eventually, we will all have been here before.