From October 3 to 28, 2016, the exhibition “LightBox: New Work by Carrie Patterson” will be on view at Mary Baldwin’s Hunt Gallery. Patterson is a visual artist working in Leonardtown, Maryland, and she is professor of art and department chair at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She earned a BFA in studio art from James Madison University in 1992 and an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. In 1996 she was a student resident at the New York Studio School where she worked with second generation abstract expressionists Charles Cajori, Mercedes Matters, and Rosemarie Beck. Patterson’s artwork has been exhibited across the country with solo shows in New York City, Philadelphia, Virginia, and Minnesota. Internationally, she has exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogota, Colombia, in the show Nine New York Painters. In 2013 her work was included in the Washington Project for the Arts SELECT 2013 and in the group exhibition In Flux at Seton Hall University.
Patterson’s artwork considers how color, form, and line metaphorically measure the human condition as experienced through the body. She says the following about the new work: “I paint to give expression to the experience of inhabiting space. I am involved in a practice of recording visual events in order to understand the impact of the physical on the emotional world around me. My hope is to create a geometric object that embodies a poetic, physical translation of place. The geometry found in architectural forms holds my attention. I am particularly interested in the vernacular architecture of places that I know well. I live in southern Maryland and am interested in historic chapels, barns, and temporary billboards. I visit particular sites over a period of time. My visits are a way of mining an experience of the building and the land as a living body. Through the accumulation of remembered experiences, I create objects made out of blocks, paper, and paint that imply a narrative of time observed and felt by the viewer. In each object that I make, I distill shape, line and color into the simplest components creating a body of work where time and sequence become important. I work on many surfaces at once, altering the arrangement of built canvas, line, shape and color in subtle degrees, much like a choreographer would alter a repetitive action across the stage.”
A reception will be held for the artist from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on October 3 in Hunt Gallery. The public is invited to attend. Hunt Gallery is dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary work in all media by regionally and nationally recognized artists. The Gallery is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday during the academic year. Hunt Gallery’s schedule for the 2016–17 academic year can be found online at go.marybaldwin.edu/arts/huntgallery.