Mary Patten

Mary Patten is an interdisciplinary visual artist and video-maker whose work crosses and combines many media: video installation, digital media, photography, artists’ books, small sculptures, ephemera, found materials and sound. She is also an educator, writer, occasional curator, and political activist, and has led and participated in public, collaborative projects for the last 25 years. Her early formal training was in painting and drawing; and for the past fifteen years, she has been working primarily as an installation artist, mainly with video and video-based installation. Since 1993, Mary Patten has been on the faculty of the Film/Video/New Media Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 "My work seeks to isolate and transmute interactions with mass media and popular culture to counteract the incessant parade of information that reduces every human and social crisis to spectacle. I use performance, agit-prop, repetition and montage, accretion and erasure to address a wide range of concerns: loss and disappearance, lesbian and queer representations in visual culture, surveillance, prison and repression.

My artistic response to an event of mythic proportions, such as the Stonewall riot, was quiet testimony. In approaching loaded subjects such as terrorism, urban crime, and serial murder, I use deliberately quiet strategies to counter media spectacles and codes, blurring constructions of "fact" and "fiction." I prefer to shun sensationalist imagery, police-blotter graphics, and titillating sound bites in favor of quiet and minimal means, trying to slow down the flood of news flashes so that more critical, poetic, and absurd readings may emerge. My work is driven by deeply-felt political ideas, as well as the desire to address the contradictory worlds of politics and art-making."

-Mary Patten

 Current and recent exhibitions, screenings, and projects include a window video installation at Art in General, and a screening on Downtown Community TV’s broadcast cable show of artists’ projects (both NYC); Operation Human Intelligence at the Hyde Park Art Center, The Art Council Show at Gallery 312, and Project Enduring Look at the 1926 Exhibition Studies Space, all in Chicago; MIX/NYC; VIDEOEX and The Colour of Friendship (Shedhalle), both in Zürich; and Women in the Director's Chair's National Touring Program. Letter to a Missing Woman, a short experimental video, has been adapted for Pointing to Prisoners, a project of U-Turn. An experimental narrative piece, More Reasons for Knocking: or, Why I can’t get out from under the shadow of Bill Viola, was published in WhiteWalls #42 (In Frame, 2001). Several installations are featured and discussed in Harmony Hammond’s book, Lesbian Art in America (Rizzoli International Publishers, 2000).