New Museal: New Work by Jehra Patrick
Opening Reception:
Saturday, February 11, 2012 6-9pm
Show Runs:
February 11 – March 25, 2012
Artists have created paradigms or indexical systems throughout history as a means for enabling access and understanding within a larger experience. In the upcoming exhibition, New Museal, artist Jehra Patrick investigates the impact of institutional structure on art history and artistic production.
Patrick’s work relies heavily on visual and art historical research. Taking a lead from artists exploring New Institutionalism, Patrick mines museum's visual archives for moments that document lesser known operations and histories, providing an alternate context for art’s development. Patrick approaches these documents as being exhibitive of her own relationship with art - its objects and history - and produces work that locate both the subject and the signifier in the same framework.
Whether relating the banal act of preparing exhibition spaces to color field painters or elevating the ‘non-art’ moments in exhibition documentation - walls, architecture, fixtures, plants, vitrines – through the picture-making strategy of the photograph, New Museal presents the objects of the museum as an introduction to Patrick’s lexicon. This body of work offers an homage to artists, movements and exhibitions and also questions the conditions - institutional and cultural - that brought them into recognition.
Jehra Patrick is a visual artist who works out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She recently received the 2011/2012 Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists. In addition to her work as an artist, Jehra is Project Coordinator for mnartists.org, where she supports Minnesota’s art community through on-line resources and offline programs, including CSA: Community Supported Art with Springboard for the Arts, the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Photographers, and programming in collaboration with the Walker Art Center, including Drawing Club and mnartists.marketplace.
*On February 22nd at 7PM please join us at Soo Visual Arts Center for a conversation with Jehra Patrick and Jill Vuchetich, archivist at the Walker Art Center, in a candid discussion about the role of archives within a contemporary art museum and how diachronic documentation of museums and art have influenced Patrick’s work.
