GABRIELLE PATTERSON

Senior Seminar Class Projects 2014-2015

Light

This project was about creating unexpected results out of everyday situations. The viewer is presented with light interactions where the source is not how it seems it should be. The integration of physical objects with the printed photograph serves to enhance the viewer's interaction with the piece. For example, the movement of air makes a hanging wire lightbulb swing, while the viewers can view themselves in the reflection of an apparently black light bulb.

Enclosure

My project is based on the idea of walls that separate and divide us as people. The walls that create “us” and “them,” do not allow for proper understanding of one another. These walls also serve to represent the depersonalization of violence in our societies. In Neither Victims nor Executioners, Albert Camus reminds the reader that what we gain in cleanliness and distance from unsettling realities, we lose in understanding of them. The walls that I am dealing with in my piece are maintained by the dehumanization of others. The plastic, joined by wire, alludes to the ways in which everyday objects have been turned into tools that take away human life.

In my piece, the field between the two walls is one of reflection, both literally and figuratively. In order to make the walls appear more imposing, the viewer enters the piece with only a view of the inside, not the outside. However, these walls are not solid. They are plastic, moving fluidly with the motion of the viewer. The floor is coated in a layer of earth, heightening the confining and claustrophobic yet potentially comforting nature of the environment, while also alluding to death and burial. It is a space that obfuscates the outer world but allows for inner reflection.  The viewers actions also have an effect on the world outside of the piece, as they pull the soil into the rest of the gallery. This is meant to remind us of the interconnectedness of our actions. Even if we are doing nothing in particular, our choices still affect the world around us.  

Monument

With my project I aim to infuse architectural landscapes with the memory of people (specifically black people) who once occupied those places through the abstraction of a portable black “monument.” The monument is both an object and a void, with the faces of the monument each reflecting light in their own way. I inject the monument into iconic spaces built with slave labor, such as the U.S. Capitol and the White House, as well as seemingly everyday landscapes in and around the University of Pennsylvania, most of which was built on what used to be a thriving African-American neighborhood called Black Bottom. Through my photographs, paintings, and drawings, I explore concepts of cultural erasure, blackness, and historical memory. In an animation, I composite photographs, of my mini-monument, that have been altered by hand through layering, cutting, erasing and drawing. The compositions of each frame start out by mirroring different medieval and Renaissance paintings in which the black body was used structurally but not as a focal point. I see these paintings as a sort of metaphor for how the black body has historically provided much of the structure on which many nations currently stand yet has still been systematically devalued.  In the animation, the monument eventually comes to take up the entire frame, and the viewer is taken on an exploration of hue, texture, and line in the seemingly flat black shape.