Personae
Patrick Carroll
09/08/23 - 11/02/23
Available Works | Press Release & Exhibition Text | Checklist | Poster
Personae presents over twenty new works in Patrick Carroll’s ongoing exploration of the material language of knitted textile. Carroll makes textiles by hand on a domestic knitting machine, using fine yarn from a collection he’s amassed over years, before stretching the fabrics on stretcher bar frames to form artworks that inhabit the space bounded by painting, sculpture, and textile arts. The works are informed by, and aim to participate in, both art history and the history of literature, especially American lyric poetry. At question is how language, when given form, perverts the dichotomy of figuration and abstraction.
This show expands two fledgling dimensions of Carroll’s work: scale and figuration. Works that approach the height and breadth of the body offer new felt relations to the conceptual play the pieces perform; works that reference, through pixelated image, episodes in the history of art both expand the citational domain and complicate the picture plane of Carroll’s art.
Personae presents a psyche desperate, via what it has learnt in its study of what others have made, to make sense of the world. It is a show about the efficacy, the range, the texture, the experience, and the use of concepts. What is language and how is it encountered? How, in a person and between people, do language, concept, and image interact? How can visual pleasure inflect literary inquest? These are some of the questions to which the works on display give body.
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Patrick Carroll (b. 1990, Menlo Park, CA) is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Commonplacing, The Meeting (New York); Dungeness, Goldfinch (Chicago); Reading, Giovanni’s Room (Los Angeles); Memoriam, Fuji Textile Week (Fujiyoshida) and JW Anderson’s Men’s S/S 2023 (Milan). Group exhibitions include Lilac, Moonbeam, and Heavenly Blue, Goldfinch (Chicago); My Whole World, Baader-Meinhof (Omaha) and Any distance between us, RISD Museum (Providence).
