Jane Bennett\u2019s book Vibrant Matter1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010.<\/span> (2010) and Karen Barad\u2019s Meeting the Universe Halfway2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).<\/span> (2007) powerfully have resonated through the practices of students, professional artists, and curators alike. From these reflections has emerged the awareness that materials are never inert but that, if allowed, they can enter the gallery space to productively bridge the ontological separation between the white cube and the world outside, and engage audiences in urgent political conversations. It is in this context that artists have devised original forms of neo-realism in which materials can be charged with political agency to become essential participants in the meaning of works of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the history of Western art, plants have often played a marginal role since the scholars of the seventeenth century relegated them to the lower ranks of artistic genres.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Andr\u00e9 F\u00e9libien (1666) cited in Steve Edwards, ed., Art and its Histories: A Reader (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 76. 76.<\/span>. Subjugated by the greatness of White culture as expressed through glorious images immortalizing mythological and religious narratives, plants have often filled in the background of paintings. Even during the rise of the Baroque still-life, when the exuberant composition of flowers took centre stage, artists repressed the alterity of plants and preferred to smother them with religious symbolism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is so that plants remained metaphorically invisible even when laid bare right in front of our eyes. Botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler argue that we can be blind to plants \u2014 a contingency that prevents us from appreciating their worth and essential role in the ecosystems that we share with them \u2014 and that in truth, they support.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, \u201cPreventing Plant Blindness,\u201d The American Biology Teacher 61, no. 2 (February 1999): 82+84+86.<\/span>. This analogy between the vegetal world and Black lives, the silence that characterizes both in the eyes of mainstream White culture, resonates loudly as we wander through the memorialized deaths in Patterson\u2019s installations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similar to Warhol\u2019s screen prints, Patterson\u2019s repetition of vegetal motifs, her patterned fabrics, and the modularity of her wallpapers flatten the subject to ultimately produce a sense of alienation, distancing, and objectification. This, in the end, is Patterson\u2019s primary concern: not to let the technologies of reproduction that govern our access to information \u2014 along with their ability to dehumanize events and individuals, and normalize social injustice, discrimination, and death \u2014 flatten lives into background images to be casually glanced at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In response to this real threat, Patterson\u2019s textiles, crocheted doilies, sparkling rhinestones, and fabric flowers stand as memorials designed to permanently preserve and make glaringly visible the identities of those who would otherwise disappear entirely. It is no longer marble, bronze, or paint that can be trusted to narrate the memories of these deaths. This has never been their domain. The role of classical art materials has always been to stand out, pure and proud, to rise above the messiness of the living world. How could they speak of betrayal that is sociological and not mythological? What could they say about the silence of those who have not died to win a war? <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n
One of the most interesting examples of this shift is found in the work of Jamaica-born mixed-media artist Ebony G. Patterson. The artist recontextualizes gender norms and explores Jamaican dancehall culture through highly engaging, colourful installations that incorporate tapestry, beading, sequins, \u00adcrochet, specially designed wallpaper, and internet-\u00adsourced images of violent murders. At first glance, Patterson\u2019s installations shimmer with saturated colours and brim with patterned motifs that intentionally attract the viewer while distracting from the subject matter. Only upon close inspection does the real content emerge from the layers of fabric and other materials that she expertly deploys to produce a political memorialization of the everyday tragedies that relentlessly shape society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO1-IMG3-IM_Aloi_Patterson_Dead-Treez_1_CMYK-C-1024x683.png\")
\u2026buried again to carry on growing<\/em>\u2026, installation view, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, 2015.
Photo : Butcher Walsh, courtesy of the artist & Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Patterson deliberately leverages the aesthet- ic appeal of different everyday materialities to collapse the distance between high and low culture. The use of cheap textiles, plastic ornaments, and glittery surfaces is a clear manoeuvre designed to challenge our conceptions of value. Social status, and the injustices generated by the structures that it implies, has defined the history of art. Classical materials embody this mindset and were used to reassess conceptions of exclusivity that defined social structures and kept them in place by preventing access to intellectual pursuits, financially as well as epistemologically. The virtuosity inscribed upon the surface of classical materials was a matter for the erudite connoisseur, a wealthy and sophisticated gatekeeper of taste and moral values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In contrast, Patterson\u2019s assemblages proudly own the kitsch of popular culture and reject the elitism that has defined the arbitrary distinction between craft and fine art since the Renaissance. It is in this context that textiles come to play an important role in the artist\u2019s work. Fabric simultaneously conceals and culturally engenders. Its history, essential functionality, ritualistic significance, and ability to become a cultural second skin are conjured in her work to represent the limitations of our perception of the world. Patterson\u2019s fabric is machine made. It is the tangible materialization of our consciousness defined by capitalism and consumerism \u2014 it wraps around objects and bodies so tightly and seamlessly that we can no longer distinguish our thinking from the matter of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The artist-designed wallpapers against which Patterson\u2019s installations unravel and the tapestries that she weaves entirely capture and further complicate this notion while foregrounding a fundamental conception of visibil- ity and invisibility that is central to her work. Whereas elaborate medieval tapestries could command the cultural gravitas of painting, the machine-produced wallpaper of Victorian times, prominently decorative and contextually muted, was designed to recede into the background,behind the furniture and the paintings. It wasn\u2019t until British textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist William Morris channelled influences from Indian tapestries, Japanese prints, and Renaissance herbals into his late-nineteenth-century designs that the expressive potential of wallpaper could claim art status.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (New York City, NY: Knopf, 1995).<\/span>. Fast-forward to the 1960s to find Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol weaponizing wallpapers as wholly self-aware, conceptual artworks in their own right: simultaneously background and foreground, loud, and shamelessly flaunting their origin in mechanical reproduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO1-IMG5-IM_Aloi_Patterson_while-the-dew-is-still-on-the-roses_CMYK-C-1024x653.png\")
\u2026while the dew is still on the roses\u2026<\/em>, installation view, P\u00e9rez Art Museum Miami, 2018\u20132019.
Photo : Oriol Tarridas, courtesy of the artist & Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Patterson\u2019s wallpapers extend this genealogy into a political present in which the events that she represents appear caught in similar political dynamics. The bright colours, patterns, and rhythms printed upon the surface of the fabric entice the viewer with a false capitalist promise of pleasure and joy, to reveal the horror of social injustice that regularly unfolds away from the sight of mainstream culture and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. To distant observers, these deaths are easy to overlook \u2014 a background against which capitalist fantasies are multiplied by social media. But to those living these realities first-hand, the events are real tragedies and irremediable personal losses caused by systemic injustice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus, visibility and invisibility play essential ethical roles in evidencing a cultural paradox that pervades Patterson\u2019s materials \u2014 they define our cultural relationship with violence, gender, and race in the post-colonial context of her native Jamaica and, by extension, within Black youth culture globally. The layering of textiles and the play of visibility\/invisibil- ity suggest that this state of affairs quickly becomes naturalized, part of a cultural undergrowth from which Patterson carefully extracts her sources. Social media and the internet have become her source of research, from which she gleans minor, yet all-important, news stories about events that often end up becoming statistics rather than grabbing headlines. Images of violent deaths \u2014 often those of people of colour whose lives are pegged to lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder \u2014 are then woven into complex multimedia assemblages designed to attract viewers. It is thus that her neo-baroque aesthetic invites us to bear witness. Its ability to fundamentally compete with other distractions, as our attention span relentlessly diminishes, says much about the power of materials in art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Furthermore, notions of invisibility, disappearance, and neglect are underlined in Patterson\u2019s frequent use of natural motifs. Embroidered flowers and butterflies, leaf patterns, and photographic images of plants often outline the borders of enchanted gardens in which the aftermath of violent deaths appears mostly concealed \u2014 discarded bodies dressed in floral patterns mimetically disguised among the cut-out leaves. This process of naturalization is central to her critique of the events that she represents and their consumption in contemporary culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/101-DO1-IMG2-IM_Aloi_Patterson_Golden-rest-C-1024x659.png\")
Golden Rest-Dead Treez<\/em>, 2015
Photo : courtesy of the artist
& Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Patterson\u2019s materials know no rhetorical affirmation. But they know how to affirm the importance of life and the duty that we all have to fight social injustice. She arranges them so that they can speak volumes about Western society and the urgency with which we need to pay attention to what is truly important: the daily loss of lives, the value attributed to BIPOC lives, how certain events are reported (or not), and the ways in which they impact our cultural understanding of race and gender and, ultimately, define our world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n