Maia Patterson

The body of work I have been developing over the course of my honors project was an act of personalizing my practice and reflect the broader ideas of that I have interacted with over the past 4 years. Dealing with anxiety around death has been a predominant part of how my research and visual practice has developed over the course of the year. Experiencing and documenting the feeling of fight or flight while in a state of pure stress and agony, and how animalistic, dehumanizing and grotesque that encounter is. Why have western attitudes toward death changed over time? Being that it is only portrayed through media through horrific atrocities as war and murder, we can hypothesis that it is far more gruesome than perhaps was once was, or maybe just we see it far more frequently. My paintings translate the decaying, dripping, convulsing landscapes of the contemporary world, and where the lines of life and death, human and animal blur in our current climate. Through depictions of the anomalous creatures, I am most drawn to avian specimens that are portrayed in a condition between sky and earth, falling or flying, in the transcendent act of becoming-animal. Or perhaps becoming-human. The concept of exhibiting these works for an audience is the same as the ideas present in Memento Mori, a reminder of our immanent nature and as a matter of the earth’s production, but not in a sense of terror or horror, but of acceptance. The fluctuating nature of the paintings over the year translate these unresolved feelings that waver in the face of death in the case of the artist.

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 In Extremis is the working title for the exhibition, building off of recent thinking surrounding the themes within the body of work. Psychological warfare internal and external, methods of disruption and causing fear and panic such as Jericho’s trumpets, a tactic on German dive bombers planes. The position of hearing a sound that drives one to a hysterical extremis of emotion. A noise that was a symbol of the enemy and of death and to cause chaos and hysteria. A war machine. Due to personal interest and influence from art history, the research I acquire always derives from figurative symbolisms from classic western painting. Although leaning further into abstraction, the figurative aspects of the body of work will not be lost, as it is a grounding to me in a reference to the classical methods of painting as Memento Mori. Through combining traditional figurative motifs, the skull particularly, merges with contemporary landscapes and wastelands that melt and decompose. For conceptual narratives between human histories and the present, but also building an aesthetic language which grows from engrained personal knowledge. Continuing these research methods and patterns continues to educate my works and advance in my creative discipline, but also the sustaining of reflection and self-realization when painting intuitively.

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The creations of both my paintings and sculptures intersect through the creation of my hands. In painting I massage watered pigments into the canvas, sinking it into the material continuing the process of adding till I find the product I desire. In sculpture I scrape away at a shape, carving and removing clay till I create the skull. Both modes of creation, but one being the positive one the negative, my paintings collapse in, and my sculpture press outward. Too through my touch they are both made which forms my visual practice. This idea of duality emphasized within life and death, push and pull, up and down.