Between Fictions:
New Work by Carrie Patterson

Press Release | Artist Biography | Exhibition Images

Between Fictions is an exhibition of new work by artist Carrie Patterson. Her paintings and collages are images that reflect the experience of inhabiting space. The question that she continues to ask is when does a perceived experience become real? Patterson asks this question throughout her process and it is a question that comes to mind when viewing her work. She is involved in the practice of recording visual events and uses memories of light and form in architectural spaces as a vehicle for creating paintings and drawings. Investigating the same image many times is essential to her process. The initial drawings and collages serve as a way to mine the image and slow down the speed of visual information. She works on many canvases at once altering the arrangement of line, shape and color in subtle degrees, much like a choreographer would alter a repetitive action across the stage.

Carrie Patterson’s colors are soft yet saturated with pigmented light; her paintings have a certain quality of subtle illumination emanating from them. They reflect architectural structures but nothing appears to be behind or in front of anything else; there is no sense of foreground/background or light/shadow relationships. Each area of color is equally filled with light, and contained gently but securely within its own distinct space. Like the rooms of a house or the people within that structure, they depend on each other for their shape and placement. Such is the structural intimacy within these compositions; one cannot imagine how the entirety could hold up if even one of the elements went missing.

-Jeanne Wilkinson

Carrie Patterson received her BFA from James Madison University in 1992. Shortly thereafter she continued her formal training at the The New York Studio School. In 1998 she earned her MFA in painting from The University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited across the country in venues such as The Painting Center in New York City, First Street Gallery in New York City, Bowery Gallery in New York City, Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art in Philadelphia, Washington Art Association in Washington Depot, CT, The Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg Virginia, Cantor –Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College in Haverford PA, and Akus Gallery at Eastern State Connecticut University in Willimantic CT. Ms. Patterson was an artist in residence at The Virginia Center for Creative Arts and The Vermont Studio Center. In 2007 she will be a resident at the Montana Artist Refuge. She has received Faculty Grants from the College of William and Mary in 2001, and from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2004, 2005, and 2006 and an Emerging Artist Grant from the Leeway Foundation in 2000. Ms. Patterson is an Assistant Professor of Art at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and this is her first solo show at The Painting Center in New York City.