PATTI OLEON

The subject matter for my work is derived from photographs I have taken in public places set up to appear habitable but resolutely lacking human presence. These include hotel and apartment lobbies and museums, specifically the period rooms in which an entire chamber or suite of rooms has been transported from its original location and reconstituted in an otherwise disassociated place and time. In addition, I have photographed sets and locations for TV and movies. All these spaces have been arranged and organized with the intent of presenting a fictitious reality, like a backdrop for human dioramas.

My work problematizes and investigates the layers and layering of artifice in these fabrications. I am especially fascinated with the intellectual consequences of decontextualizing not only things, but also places, coupled with the process of layering one thing with the appearance of another, and all that such illusion and disassociation—both geographical and temporal—implies. Period rooms, for example, translate and transform social environments, a process requiring an imaginative leap on the part of the viewer willing to succumb to the experience of the artifice. My work explores the chasm over which the imagination of the viewer leaps.

I have worked from reproductions - the re-producing of real places, artificially constructed, transplanted rooms in museums and sets where they are - so to speak - out of place: out of context, contrived, transplanted in time, and always void of human presence. To unpack the mysterious alchemy that occurs in these contrived spaces, I emphasize their dense physicality and the quality of the artificial light, which is generally their sole illumination. My paintings render this light as it reveals some details while obscuring others, displacing location and time for the viewer. No longer what they once were, the rooms continue to signify their original intention; they are simultaneously real and unreal. Working with my photographs, I then edit, enhance, alter, and at times double the images in Photoshop before bringing the image to the panels. The final paintings are an amalgam of contradictions, blurring the line between the real and the artificial, the dark and the light, and the banal and the transcendent. I use traditional, old master techniques to create paintings that reference the past yet are firmly rooted in the present. Despite their seeming realism based in optical observation, the works are clearly the result of seeing through a lens. This is especially clear in the way that I treat light. The light refracts, blurs, and creates auras in a way that our eyes, with their auto focus, never do, but which is a common conceit of photography.