Ebony G. Patterson: ...for those who bear/bare witness...

Ebony G. Patterson ...for those who bear/bare witness...

Ebony G. Patterson ...for those who bear/bare witness...

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Ebony G. Patterson’s fourth solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, November 15, 2018 - January 12, 2019 Essay by Stuart Horodner, Director of University of Kentucky Art Museum All images by RCH Photography

©2018

“These new works create an immersive installation– a nocturnal garden that acknowledges bodies and sites, that uses pageantry and beauty to create presence in ‘gardens’ gone awry.

We come to pause, to bear witness, and to acknowledge…”

- Ebony G. Patterson

Introduction

...for those who bear/bare witness.. Ebony G. Patterson’s fourth solo show at the gallery. Patterson’s multilayered practice – in sculpture, installation, performance, and video – uses beauty as a tool. She employs opulent, hand-embellished surfaces and brightly colored patterns to seduce the viewer into bearing witness to the violence and social injustices imposed upon the invisible and the voiceless.

These new works – exquisitely and ornately embellished with myriad materials such as glitter, stickers, and varied textiles, among other things – are an unmistakable call to action and testimonial. The titular wordplay – …for those who bear/bare witness… implicates not only the viewer, who must acknowledge the content of Patterson’s presentation, but also the anonymous victims memorialized by the works, whose bodies are disappeared, or laid bare.

Indeed, Patterson has been slowly taking apart her figures, calling attention to their invisibility on the larger world’s stage precisely by disappearing them in her own works.

The new works depict a jumbled jungle of lush flora and fauna, through whose coiled vines and fertile floral sprays ghostly corporeal forms are just barely visible. A closer look and limbless, headless torsos, cloaked in jewel-toned finery, become apparent. Confidently posed, they flaunt a melancholy greatness. Elsewhere, unattached limbs mingle with the verdant density, and animals such as owls, bears, or roosters keep watch. Presented on a newly artist-designed fabric wallpaper, which depicts an uneasily peaceful image of a garden at night, these works put forth an environment of uncanny, ominous beauty and decay. These are gardens where life and death co-mingle, where bodies are buried, historical traumas are revealed, and souls are set free.

Garden Breakdown

If you see something, say something.

I have seen Ebony G. Patterson’s art up close for the past four years, watching her painting practice stride into the “expanded field” with confidence. Everything that can add referential precision is allowed in, and the stuff of sculpture heads towards installation and increasingly, site specificity. Ebony gathers playful and potent images along with a cornucopia of readymade materials to perform a big-hearted seduction of the viewer. Embedded in her opulent affability is a dead serious need for consciousness-raising.

We first met on the campus of the University of Kentucky, where Ebony was a faculty member for eleven years. She was on the search committee that eventually suggested hiring me to become the fifth director of the UK Art Museum. Soon after my arrival in summer, she invited me to see several works that were about to be shipped out for an exhibition. They were arranged in a large common area, hanging against bumpy sheetrock walls. I had not seen these tapestry-like hangings before. I peered at and into them; simultaneously figurative and ornamental, like sporting camouflage at the carnival.

I remember asking Ebony if anyone had contextualized her among the artists of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement. Her answer was no. I was thinking about several men and women who had been championed by dealer Holly Solomon; and other practitioners whose art indulged in indulgence and reveled in a visual robustness that countered the ascetic clarity of Minimalism. This was the first time I had seen crinkled cellophane, wild wallpaper, beads, and embroidery in Manhattan galleries. I rattled off a list including Cynthia Carlson, Kim MacConnel, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Miriam Schapiro, Ned Smyth, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, and Robert Zakanitch.

It is always tricky to discuss precedents and peers with an artist. It can feel invalidating to them, rather than expansive. We spoke of these “feminists with fabric” and “men who sew” for a short while. I don’t recall us talking much about Radcliffe Bailey, Sanford Biggers, Mickalene Thomas, or Kehinde Wiley, either; although Ebony has exhibited with some of these artists. I just looked and became familiar with her chief concerns and procedural strategies.

In 2015, I included Ebony in “Bottoms Up: A Sculpture Survey,” a large intergenerational group show at our museum. We presented five decorated and elevated child-sized coffins from her Invisible Presence: Bling Memories series. They occupied the corner with a mournful ascendency, installed near Stephen, a wall-mounted plaster head and torso by John Ahearn, and Willie Cole’s Shoonufu Female Figure, his trompe l’oeil cast bronze that reclaims the power of African art and fashionable footwear while throwing shade at Picasso. Nearby on the floor sat a Felix Gonzalez-Torres endless stack of grainy black and white posters, featuring a lone bird flying in a cloudy sky.

As two significant career markers have just opened - an extensive exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and Ebony’s fourth solo show at Monique Meloche Gallery - I cannot help but think about the command that she brings to her current productions. New works continue to include meticulously staged photographs of black and brown bodies that are turned into printed tapestries by a commercial weaver, but they have become almost entirely undone by acts of dismemberment and adornment. The cropping and cutting of figures has deposited arms and legs across the lush landscape. Headless matriarchs bend to search for missing children, their own bodies festooned with strands of ribbon and glass pearls, the same items that map the contours of specific flora. Bling attracts, watchful birds perch, and colorful vines cascade over the topography like uncontrollable tears.

Ebony’s titles are apt, using the refrain “for those who bear/bare witness” in combination with beginning lines including, “they couldn’t unsee,” “they wondered what to do,” and “she saw things she shouldn’t have,” among others. These are like hashtags that speak of a steady stream of horrible acts and subsequent traumas. The artist will not look away and insists that we don’t either.

As I write this last line, my mind wanders to Leon Golub, my mentor and a native son of Chicago. His intelligent anger as artist/activist produced numerous works that pictured brutalized bodies that were the result of officially sanctioned violence and various abuses of power. In the mid-1980s, Golub’s unstretched canvases were animated by sedentary black men who regard each other and us with suspicious stares. A few paintings in this period are titled Threnody, and depict standing women performing songs or poems of mourning.

His two series, We Can Disappear You and This Could Be You, both made in the aftermath of 9/11, collapse the space between observer and potential victim.

These conditions can be found in abundance in Ebony G. Patterson’s meditations on disenfranchised communities and vulnerable citizens, be it in her native Jamaica or locations around the globe. Her elaborate works speak to the significance of witnessing and the condemnation of brutalities both large and small. In her gardens, beauty and hope mingle with uncertainty and decay, and we must find an empathetic space in which to stand.

Stuart Horodner Director of University of Kentucky Art Museum

...she saw things she shouldn’t have...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with glitter, appliquÊs, pins, embellishments, fabric, tassels, acrylic, brooches, glass pearls, beads, and 9 hand-gilded conch shells with toy coins 8.8 x 7.1 feet

still.... for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with glitter, appliquĂŠs, pins, embellishments, fabric, tassels, acrylic, brooches, glass pearls, and beads 12.5 x 9.3 feet

...they embraced in question...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with glitter, appliquĂŠs, pins, embellishments, fabric, tassels, brooches, acrylic, glass pearls, beads, on artist-designed fabric wallpaper 10.75 x 10 feet

..in loving memory...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with embellishments, trim, pins, tassels, beads, glitter, appliquĂŠs, buttons, brooches, fabric, feathered butterflies and funerary wreath, on artist-designed fabric wallpaper 10.6 x 7.6 feet

...among the blades between the flowers...while the horse watches ...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with glitter, appliquĂŠs, beads, trim, brooches, feathered butterflies, fabric, silk flowers, and hand-embellished resin owl on shelf, on artist-designed fabric wallpaper 10.8 x 14.6 feet

....they waited...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with glitter, appliquĂŠs, beads, trim, brooches, feathered butterflies, fabric, on artist-designed fabric wallpaper 9.6 x 6 feet

...among the flowers between the blades...while the dew is on the roses ...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with acrylic, trim, embellishments fabric, giclee print, glitter, beads, pins, brooches, and plastic bugs, on artist-designed fabric wallpaper 11.8 x 16.8 feet

...fraught...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with glitter, appliquĂŠs, beads, trim, brooches, feathered butterflies, beaded cap, fabric, silk flowers, on artist-designed fabric wallpaper 10.1 x 12.3 feet

...dignity...for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut paper with hand-cut paper elements, plastic letters, feathered butterflies, and crown 7.5 x 8 feet

...they wondered what to do... for those who bear/bare witness, 2018 Hand-cut jacquard woven photo tapestry with glitter, appliquĂŠs, pins, brooches, embellishments, fabric, tassels, acrylic, glass pearls, beads, 3 hand- embellished resin-based roosters on stands, on artist-designed fabric wallpaper 9.3 x 6.1 feet

Ebony G. Patterson Biography

Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 in Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in Kingston and Lexington, KY) received her BFA from Edna Manley College, Kingston, Jamaica (2004) and MFA from Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis, MO (2006). Patterson has had solo exhibitions and projects at many US institutions including Pérez Art Museum Miami (through May 5, 2019); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (through April 7, 2019); The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2016); Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, GA (2016); and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2016).

Dead Treez, Patterson’s first large-scale institutional solo show, originated at the Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2015) and traveled to Museum of Art and Design, NY (2015); Boston University Art Galleries, MA (2016); and UB Art Galleries, University at Buffalo, NY (2017). Her work was included in Open Spaces Kansas City (2018), the 32nd São Paulo Bienal: Live Uncertainty (2016); the 12th Havana Biennial: Between the Idea and the Experience, Cuba (2015); Prospect.3: Notes for Now, New Orleans (2014), and the Jamaica Biennial 2014, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva Island, FL (2017) and served on the Artistic Director’s Council for Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017).

Patterson has received numerous awards, including the Stone and DeGuire Art Award, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis (2018); United States Artist Award (2018); Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017); Joan Mitchell Foundation Art Grant (2015); and the Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, in conjunction with Small Axe Project (2012). Patterson’s work is included in a number of public collections, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; 21c Museum Hotels; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. Patterson is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

mon i quemeloche 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago 60622 312 243 2129 moniquemeloche.com