EXHIBITION: I am an unruly wind
I am an unruly wind
DAISY PATTON
Friday, May 3 – Saturday, June 22, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION | Friday, May 3, from 5-8 pm
Candela gallery is excited to share the monumental, colorful mixed media works of Massachusetts based artist, Daisy Patton. Patton utilizes scale, color, and presentation to elevate the found photograph to an iconographic status, breathing life and distinction into forgotten faces. The gallery will be featuring 14 pieces in Patton’s exhibition, I am an unruly wind beginning Friday, May 3 and remaining up through Saturday, June 22.
Daisy Patton, Untitled (Untitled (6+18+12+6=42+114=156 143)), 2020/2024. Photo Sourced From Varna, Bulgaria. Oil on Archival Print Mounted to Panel with Frame, 26 x 32 inches. INQUIRE.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
History is written by the winners, engraved with power structures that suppress and silence. Our historical memory leaves out most people, and that especially includes women and their lineages. Names erased in marriage, their bodies not their own, women have survived as long-ago matriarchs and people whose lives are frequently forgotten. In this moment of increasing gender violence, restrictions and loss of civil rights, I am reminded of how much the present has already been acted out in the past. We’ve danced to this song all too well and too often. In I am an unruly wind, I am interested in the interior lives of those who preceded us, of their relationships and ways they persevered. With each portrait, viewers can imagine and connect with women whose existences and memories have been lost to time, yet who are present before them. The past is often seen as separate from our present, but it repeats and lingers like whispering ghosts. We cannot break free from this haunting until we learn to embrace our fragility—that one wild and precious life—but also each other. Collective care and the recognition that we all deserve bodily autonomy, safety, community and joy are what bring us forward in time. -DP
Daisy Patton, Untitled (Studio Lux Mosque Square in Heliopolis April 7, 1961), 2020/2023. Translated from Arabic. Photo from Lebanon Sourced in Los Angeles, CA. Oil on Archival Print Mounted to Panel with Arch, 97.5 x 68 inches.
Daisy Patton, Untitled (Seated Magenta Woman in the Grass with Tree Leaves and Lily Vines), 2024. Photo Sourced from Phoenix, AZ. Oil on Archival Print Mounted to Panel with Frame and Crosshead, 67 x 43 inches.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daisy Patton is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Los Angeles, CA to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. She spent her childhood moving between California and Oklahoma, deeply affected by these conflicting cultural landscapes and the ambiguous absences within her family. Influenced by collective and political histories, Patton explores storytelling and story-carrying, the meaning and social conventions of families, and what shapes living memory. Her work also examines in-between spaces and identities, including the fallibility of the body and the complexities of relationship and connection.
Currently residing in western Massachusetts, Patton has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including a solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado, the Chautauqua Institution and the Fulginitti Pavilion at the Center for Bioethics at the Anschutz Medical Campus, as well as group shows with Spring/Break NYC, the Katonah Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, the International Museum of Science and Art, among others. She has paintings held in public and private collections such as the Denver Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, Seattle University, Fidelity Investments Art Collection, and in international airport Boston Logan with Delta Airlines, among others. 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 that debuted spring 2021.
Patton has completed artist residencies at Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, Minerva Projects, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has been awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, an Assets for Artists Massachusetts Matched Savings grant, a Montage Travel Award from SMFA for research in Dresden, Germany, as well as longlisted for the Aesthetica Prize 2022. She earned her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program, and has 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 Koslov Larsen represents her in Houston, TX.