Beneath the Earth, the Sky
by Carrie Paterson
April 26 – May 26, 2024
Opening: April 26, 6pm
Artist talk: May 16, 6pm – with Carrie Paterson and Christopher Michno
The Institute for Art and Olfaction is thrilled to welcome artist Carrie Paterson in a solo exhibition: Beneath the Earth, the Sky.
Carrie Paterson’s art-technology practice uses research and haptic experience to explore memory, displacement, sensory experience, and diaspora. Her exhibition Beneath the Earth, the Sky uses the sculptural premise of inversion to reflect upon the current moment within a diverse history of contemplative practices, from miniatures, bonsai, tabletop landscapes, skipping stones, stargazing, shrines, incense, and other ways we commemorate and mold time. Her collaborative partners are plants and trees — those architects of our pasts and our futures — as well as stones and the wisdom of the inner body, which are on a temporal continuum with the energy of the cosmos. The latent effects of gravity, our attempts to escape it, and the temporary freedom of weightless experience contrast with failure, open systems, and natural decay.
Mixed media works and miniature landscapes combine flora and images of nature from a 2024 Chinese calendar into models of non-linear dynamical systems. Her Homesickness Kit for spacefarers provides a palliative device for people displacement from “home,” equally relevant to the émigré, refugee, or survivor. A map of the heavens made of olfactory cues (Chemisphere) posits new structures for the heavens in terms of what we know about extrasolar chemistry, the search for life elsewhere, and the specificity of our lives on Earth. A memorial piece in the window visualizes a puzzle of cause-and-effect in the process of writing history. Glass vessels[1] with olfactory components (Copernican System No. 1; Three Body Harmony) construct models of the cosmos, our bodies, and cognitive psychology — the processes of humans’ understanding of self within the contexts of body, society, world, universe, and the imagination of the invisible, immaterial beyond.
Via periodic orientation in language and mapping, Paterson’s speculative devices and sculptures engage a philosophical process used by humans to deepen and expand perception of the world. While she enjoys a good critique of phenomenology as it reveals itself in nationalism, cultures of extraction and accumulation, scarcity capitalism, extortion, violent ideologies, and blood-and-soil Heideggerianism, she also uses phenomenology’s insights to enhance the intuitive aspect of art making. As a counter-valences to phenomenological readings in her work is the idea of nomadicity — the displacement of people throughout space over time — traversing meanings of place and territory with a spatial philosophy that redirects the outward journey to the internal, grounds the metaphysical in the secular, and pays close attention to the human-earth/nature “metabolic rift” (Kohei Saito)[2] while investing in cultures of care.
On May 16, join us for a conversation with artist Carrie Paterson and Christopher Michno (Assistant Director of Pitzer College Art Galleries).
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ABOUT CARRIE PATERSON
Carrie Paterson, born 1972, grew up in a small mountain ski town in Colorado, former home to the Ute tribe before nineteenth-century silver mining. Her father and grandfather were Viennese-Jewish exiles, survivors of WWII, her father having been given a new name when he was adopted in Australia; her mother’s family were immigrant farmers from Schleswig-Holstein who cultivated land in Minnesota before the Dakota Wars, with her maternal grandfather “called” to become a Protestant minister later in Iowa. She is currently based in the diversely aggregate population of Los Angeles, which includes members of the Gabrielino and Tongva tribes, along with descendants of other ancient settlers on this land.
Paterson completed her MFA at UC Irvine in 2001 and has a previous Literature degree from Yale. Awarded several grants over the past 25 years, she also loves being a finalist: for the Howard Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture, for the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, and twice a finalist for the IAO’s Sadakichi Award for Experimental Scent. She currently volunteers in the bonsai nursery at the Huntington Gardens and, with her husband, runs an animal leisure home in Eagle Rock. See more about her work and read her art critical texts at: cpworks.org.
See more about her work and read her art critical texts at: cpworks.org.
[1] US Utility Patent No. 8,499,960 B2, co-inventors Carrie Paterson and Robert Maiden
[2] Saito’s book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of De-Growth Communism, lays out a reading of Marx that shows how capitalism and production have engendered the climate emergency. The role of humans in conducting ecological repair is emphasized. In practice, “de-growth” will be difficult if not impossible to achieve under current global political and social division; but it does provide a compass for change and positive outcomes out of a crisis that will descend upon us anyway. One caveat is that past readings of Marx provide a cautionary tale about the relationship between revolution and tyranny, one that we should not dismiss.