Foto Relevance is pleased to present Restless Symmetries: Barbara Strigel and Kelda Van Patten. This show marks the gallery's debut exhibition of works by each artist, selected from portfolio reviews at PhotoLucida 2022. Restless Symmetries will be on view at Foto Relevance from July 16th through September 3rd, 2022.
Barbara Strigel’s work investigates architecture as the visual language of a city, not separate from its inhabitants, but a part of the same constellation. Her digital collages, created with her photographs, drawings, and physically torn and layered paper, become constructed architectural spaces reaching for a sense of visual unity. These fragmentary moments are resonant, sensory perceptions that invite connection to space. Strigel's work explores both the physicality of the city as well as the people who navigate it, the balance of connection and separation within the urban space.
Kelda Van Patten’s constructed photographs involve a variety of physical and digital processes to occupy liminal spaces between artifice and truth, imagination and the real, and mimesis and the origin. Her still life images reference the melancholic curiosities of kitsch, as well as Memento Mori and Vanitas, visual symbolism developed in 17th-century Dutch paintings. The colors and forms in Van Patten’s work frequently relate to the stereotypically feminine, which she subverts through disruption, referencing expressions of loss. The images do not find their final form after being photographed - they are cut, taped to the wall, rephotographed, and digitally transformed endlessly. Van Patten’s process embodies cycles of change: perpetually unfolding, and in a permanent state of suspense. Through these iterations, she both celebrates and questions relationships between the natural world and the artificial kingdom of kitsch.
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Barbara Strigel, A Field is a Passage, 2022
Barbara Strigel
Barbara Strigel uses her urban/street photography to convey the sense of being “alone together” in urban life. For the body of work entitled “We Were Neither Here nor There,” she comments: “There’s a certain gestalt in the balance of connection and separation that occurs in cities. We go about our business, sharing the sidewalk but lost in our own thoughts… For me, street photography and collage are both a search for unity. ” Another set of her images is titled “If We Were to Talk about Architecture.” Here, she comments: “In the shape of the city, there are instances when architecture becomes an entry point. The shadow of leaves on a blue wall becomes a recollection of summer, telephone wires sing jazz, and a repetition of square windows evoke a meditation. These fragmentary moments are resonant, sensory perceptions that invite connection to space.”
Her works are interpretations of the idea of the city, and as such often combine imagery of multiple cities. "These collages are not about specific locations. Instead, they explore the idea that a city is a perception, shaped by individual associations and experiences... It’s the idea of an analogous city, one that takes its shape from collective memory. When I construct these collages, I work with fragments of my photographs. I layer them, positioning and arranging until something resonant begins to appear, and then I work to unify the pieces into an evocative familiar space. I want my collages to remind the viewer of the way a place appears in recollection.”
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Barbara Strigel, A Field is an Overture, 2022
What we find in common with all of Strigel’s images in this exhibition is the generous visual gift of space, despite the sense of urban living. There is an airiness to her work, that invites rather than overwhelms, that gives us room to breathe rather than feel claustrophobic and hemmed in, surrounded by stifling huge concrete and iron monoliths of the urban space. With her use of patches of color, we are given a sense of festivity rather than confrontation with the drab, dirty, gray sidewalks and unexciting colors of most buildings, and the lack of green spaces that offer what natural color a city might have beyond flashing neon signs, billboards and a blue sky, if we can see through the smoke and smog.
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Kelda Van Patten, The table laid before a party, the unperceived and therefore never felt and seldom expressed; the funeral silence of bones beneath the green carpet of evenly cut grass (the sadness of green, after Mary Ruefle), 2021
Kelda Van Patten
Kelda Van Patten's work references and subverts the classic still life, the domestic space, and concepts of kitsch. She states: “I seek to invoke a sense of surprise or contradiction through the consideration of photographs that occupy liminal spaces between artifice and truth, imagination and the real, and mimesis and the origin. The subjects that I photograph are mined from the natural world and kitsch… For example, I think of artificial flowers, fruit, and plants as kitsch objects that attempt to mimic the blooming beauty of nature, while virtually eliminating the process of decay from the natural world… My printed photographs are often cut and taped to the wall and rephotographed. In that sense, my work embodies the natural cycles of change: perpetually unfolding, and in a permanent state of suspense.”
Van Patten considers kitsch in a broad sense and seeks to reference that world, rather than create images which are kitsch themselves. Inspired by the poetry of Mary Ruefle, Van Patten’s images hold a deeper reflection on how we live. Ruefle’s writings on color deeply inform the work, and Van Patten’s titles often directly reference passages of her poetry, such as the following: “Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is the sadness of June, of shiny toasters as they come out of their boxes, the table laid before a party, the smell of new strawberries and dripping roasts about to be devoured; it is the sadness of the unperceived and therefore never felt and seldom expressed, except on occasion by polka dancers and little girls who, in imitation of their grandmothers, decide who shall have their bunny when they die. Green sadness weighs no more than an unused handkerchief, it is the funeral silence of bones beneath the green carpet of evenly cut grass upon which the bride and groom walk in joy.”
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Kelda Van Patten, Human organs, words with too many meanings, and insomnia (the sadness of Purple, after Mary Ruefle), 2021
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Kelda Van Patten, The secret lies in selecting the right plant for the right spot, 2021
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Kelda Van Patten, Never do they cease to be in flower and in fruit (in reference to King Alcinous’s orchards,Homer, Odyssey, Book 7), 2021
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Kelda Van Patten, Fruit of the Loom/Womb, 2020
The artist uses many materials in her constructed still life images which reference constructs of femininity by investigating the domestic space. She incorporates elements such as cutouts of lipstick, books on gardening and entertaining, houseplants, and especially florals and fruits, both real and artifical. In her own words, Van Patten is both celebrating and critiquing how fruit and flowers are often used as a reference or substitution for the female and female identifying body in Western culture. As in much of her work, she subverts the stereotypically feminine imagery by cutting, tearing, folding, taping, piling, spilling, and using photoshop in ways that expose rather than conceal. She reveals mistakes and imperfections rather than covering them up, in direct conflict with the long-standing tradition in media and advertising of concealing and touching up. Van Patten also frequently photographs flowers and fruit that are no longer in their so-called “prime,” referencing and critiquing the “forever young” aspect of these artificial objects.
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Barbara Strigel is a photographer, collage artist and bookmaker living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was born in Philadelphia and studied photography and printmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. For over 20 years she taught photography, pottery and graphic design in Seattle where she also advised a literary magazine. Her collages, photographs and handmade books have been shown in both Canada and the United States. Her work has been published in Diffusion Annual, PDN, Don't Take Pictures, Photo Ed and Book Arts Du Livre and Contemporary Collage Magazine. In 2019, she was recognized in the Top 50 in Photo-Lucida's Critical Mass. In 2022, she was recognized as a Finalist in LensCulture’s Fine Art Photography Awards.
Kelda Van Patten is a visual artist and art educator residing in Portland, Oregon. Kelda’s photographs create disorienting pictorial spaces that merge photography with the cut-out, collage, and painting. Kelda is a recipient of the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s Make Grant (2021), in the top 200 for Photolucida’s critical mass, and she has held residencies at NES (Iceland) and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (Oregon). Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Blue Sky Gallery, Carnation Contemporary, and Well Well Projects (Portland, Oregon), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), the Cuernavaca Museum of Art (Mexico), and Platform Gallery (Seattle). Kelda’s work has been featured in several online and print publications including Fraction Magazine, the.waiting.room.gallery, In the In-Between, and Platform Gallery. She holds an MFA in Craft and Material Studies from Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art, an MAT in art education from Lewis and Clark College, and a BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Kelda teaches visual art at da Vinci Arts Middle School and Portland State University.