Solo Exhibition: Daisy Patton and Nina Tichava

Solo Exhibition:

Daisy Patton|Burnt Hair Spun Gold

Opening: Saturday, September 19, 2-5:30 pm,(Timed Entry)

Exhibition runs throughOctober 24, 2020.

A celebrated multi-disciplinary artist, currently based in Massachusetts, Daisy Patton continues her"Forgetting is so long" series with the solo exhibition, “Burnt Hair Spun Gold.”This exhibition delves deeper into the topic of women and female relationships, which she defines broadly and inclusively.  As part of her practice, Patton collects abandoned family photographs, enlarges them to life-size, and paints over them as a kind of re-enlivening, removing the individuals from their formerly static location and time. 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.

With her work Patton asks the question, “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 a suffocation. 

The series, “Forgetting is so long,” as a whole, explores concepts of memory, identity and loss. Patton explains, “Family photographs are revered vestiges to their loved ones, but if they become unmoored, the images and people within become hauntingly absent.” Drawing inspiration from anthropologist Michael Taussig, who states that defacing sacred objects forces a “shock into being,” Patton uses her artwork to lovingly bring her subjects back to life and give the lost photographs a new meaning, compelling the viewer to then perceives them as present and piercing. Patton shares insight of what inspires her practice, “By mixing painting with photography, I seek to lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into a loving act of remembrance.”

Daisy Patton

is a multi-disciplinary artist who was born in Los Angeles, CA to a mother from the 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 history, as well as memory and the fallibility of the body, Patton’s work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, relationship, storytelling and story-carrying, and also connection. One prominent series, Forgetting is so long, has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, The Denver Post, The Chautauquan Daily, and more. Currently residing in western Massachusetts, Patton has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. She earned her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program. 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 has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including her first museum solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado. Minerva Projects Press will publish a collection of essays and poetry on Patton’s practice in fall 2020. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver, CO, and J. Rinehart represents her in Seattl

Nina Tichava

| You Color the Sky

Opening: Saturday, September 19, 2-5:30 pm, (Timed Entry)

Exhibition runs through October 24, 2020.

This most recent body of work by Nina Tichava, produced entirely during the Covid-19 pandemic and largely in isolation, reaches to the past and references a span of artistic movements including the Bauhaus, 1960s Minimalism, Op Art and the Light & Space artists of the 1970s. Specifically, Tichava has been revisiting the works and writings of Joseph and Anni Albers, Donald Judd, Robert Irwin and James Turrell.  

A central catalyst for Tichava’s interest in the Minimalist and Light & Space movements are frequent visits to Marfa, Texas and the Chinati Foundation over the past few years. She shares, “though the sensibilities of Minimalism and Light & Space are nearly a polar-opposite to my own works which are steeped in maximalism, I respond strongly to the intentional qualities of the large-scale project dedicated to art and aesthetic which is Marfa, and to the purist motivations of a formative generation of artists with the imaginations and resources to create a monument to “Art with a capital A” which serves as an anchor in time and history.”  

Tichava reasons that the philosophical, and arguably spiritual, thread connecting many of these artists stems largely from Albers and continues almost three-quarters of a century to the present with Turrell and Irwin; this thread maintains a belief and assertion that the purpose and goal of art is experiential and driven by perception; that ultimately, the objective in creating and observing art is to dispel with preconceptions and to arrive at a place of just viewing. “It’s easy, and so clean and clear as an answer and an aspiration,” she explains.  

Tichava is drawn to this simplicity, she continues, “[drawn] to the bare-boned idea of perceptual experience as the artist’s paramount ambition. Can I reach a state in my own viewing of an object to, as Robert Irwin suggests, forget the name of the thing I’m seeing? Is that the essence of art? And as a person making art, can I create the invitation for others to ‘just simply see’ it? Is that enough?”   Acknowledging her position in the world as a sensitive woman and artist, one of privilege, living through a pandemic, civil unrest, racial and economic inequality, climate change, etc., she says, “it feels like so much to confront,” and goes on to say, “Perhaps this is the time for setting aside long-held assumptions about ourselves and others, and the spaces we occupy, and the stories we’ve created to get us to this moment.” The artist proposes, “Maybe we can arrive at a place of understanding that the colors we see are affected by our histories and experiences, by the cells in our eyeballs and the shortcuts in our brains that have evolved over centuries and millennia. If questioned about the color of the sky, automatically and without looking most of us would answer “blue”; but our evolution is hopefully angled to a place where we’re open to seeing the color of the sky for what it is, by simply looking at it, with its inherent subtleties and variations. That might be enough, or a beginning.”  

Describing this newest body of work, Tichava clarifies that although it may not be immediately apparent how these paintings relate to the above-referenced movements and artists, “in these works I’m borrowing many of their ideas. I use hand-painted gradations and optical blending techniques focused on overlapping color and pattern. Working with the ephemeral qualities of reflected light and color interaction, I incorporate simple materials to create the impression of complex mechanics with an atmospheric, glowing effect.

I repeat form and shape to develop a sense of non-objective abstraction, and use architectural and botanical elements to suggest but not define content or subject. My hope is that the coalescence of these elements generates an opportunity for capturing multiple visual effects within a moment, using pattern, color and light to manufacture an intimate observational experience. And further that this experience might create a set of questions and ideas within the viewer, much like my own.”  

The title of this project is from James Turrell, and the artist cites one of the quotes which particularly inspired her when completing this body of paintings: “The sky in no longer out there, but it is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky.” —James Turrell Nina Tichava was raised in both rural northern New Mexico and the Bay Area in California. She was influenced by her father, a construction worker and mathematician and by her mother, who is an artist and designer.

The reflections of these dualities—country to city, pragmatist to artist, nature to technology—are essential to and evident in her paintings. Nina is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award Grant in 2007 and has exhibited professionally since 2009. She received her BFA from California College of the Arts [+ Crafts] in San Francisco/Oakland.