What is my work about?
My artwork functions as a speculative practice about digital images, their pixels, and virtual interfacing. A catalyst of my artwork looks at the history of the photographic picture-point to the modern pixel. By transforming the raw image data coming from the Curiosity Rover on Mars I re-invent touchstone digital images through the lens of photographic history, typography, and media theory. In my reinvention of these images I use self-built 3d printers and 2d plotters to output my processes and image manipulations. Objectively, in using these tools I aspire to invoke new methods in which digital images are seen and physically produced as they ceaselessly create meaning, redefine perception, and concrete experience. My video practice looks at how technological interfaces reinforces, re-encodes, and creates new behaviors among people and objects. In my video work I create looping video scenes combining physical objects and digital refuse, often melding the lines between real and virtual.
Artist Statement
“Faux Tableaux” is an ongoing series of seamlessly looping videos that demonstrate the peculiar circumstances of digital integration throughout concrete reality. These videos display inhabited spaces set within sterile tableaux. The videos and it’s contents within each scene seamlessly move, intermingling both images and objects from physical and virtual space. The environments in the videos are constructed in both digital and “real” space. These videos are in response to how digital systems are currently usurping our referencing habits to objects in tangible reality. These videos are calculated and sardonic; they serve as fantastical demonstrations that catalog and invent situations that influence contemporary perception. This body of work aims to unveil the control certain technologies have (or will have) on perception.
“Image Lexicons” is a body of work that explores alternative digital image making through the history of photography and the abstract material of images, being pixels. In this practice I design typographic marks that ultimately function as a visible lexicon for viewing digital images. The end results of these processes are output through self-built 3d printers and 2d computer plotters. I build my own gear for transparency purposes, it is important for me to know how the machine works in order to understand and experiment with my aesthetic results.
This practice looks at the history of the pixel arguably originating from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California during the 1970’s (who is currently administering the Curiosity Rover program on Mars) and Vilém Flusser’s theory of concretizing abstract particles through imaging apparatuses and writing. In this body of work I create my own catalogs of idiosyncratic marks that stand in for pixels to better understand our experience of visual history through digital propagation. In this practice I’m interested in melding together both protocols of writing and digital photography. In short, photographic image-makers create pictures from within the camera automatically, allowing the photographer to concentrate on the entire image to be taken while usually overlooking the complex system that creates the image from within the machine. On the other hand, a writer passes through the machine directly to the formation of a text, and can consider the individual elements that make up a language: letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation. The act of writing does not have to rely on technology for it to exist. Working as an image-maker I envisage entire images perceived by machines, and like a writer I consider the individual pieces that make up an image through the use of a purely visual typographic system. The re-encoding of images into physical typographic marks is an important part of my practice as it functions as a demonstrable construction of concrete pixels.
The physical results of this body of work are solely made out of seamlessly designed typography, every glyph is connected to a parent glyph on a combination of X, Y, and Z coordinates. Like pixels, each glyph needs a parent that changes in values of lightness and darkness, so when seen at a distance a viewer can see an entire image. In this case, the amount of minute physical space each printed glyph takes up to create visible information functions as a pixel as well, but is also meant to be addressed closely, such as when one reads writing. Finding a discernible resting place in pixel size is important, as this work extends from a practice that looks at the function of typography, pixels, and computer vision. Contemporary picture-points are exiting the screen, commanding much of our sight, and future physical reality. Pixels are not necessarily small squares resting on a screen but they are a visible medium between image and physical object. Seeing that knowledge is increasingly being derived from pixel based displays then one could argue that most of our understanding of the tangible world is rooted in pixels.
CV
Education
MFA 2013 Studio Art Brooklyn College
BFA 2007 Studio Art University of Montevallo
Educational Work
2013 to present, Lab Director, Digital Art Labs at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY
2007-2009, Art Instructor, Young Rembrandts, Homewood, AL
Solo Exhibitions
2010
Mating Season, Yogiga Gallery, Hongdae, Seoul, South Korea
2008
Mitch Patrick: Recent works, University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL
2007
Mitch Patrick: BFA Thesis exhibition, University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL
Group Exhibitions
2014
More-than-one-and-less-than-two, GordilloScudder, Brooklyn, NY
Theorizing the Web, Windmill Studios, Brooklyn, NY
Once upon a time, there was the end, The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY
2013
Encoding Identities, Snap Gallery / University of Alberta, Edmonton, CA
Twelve: Brooklyn College MFA thesis exhibition, Show Room, New York, NY
Para|Sites: Locations and Dislocations of Media, New York University, New York, NY
2012
You Are Here*, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY
inLINE, galleryELL, Brooklyn, NY
Indefinite Whole, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY
2011
Double Spaced, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY
Cluster Bomb, The Bowery Poetry Club, New York, NY
D.C.C.S, Yogiga Gallery, Hongdae, South Korea
2009
The Show at Woodlawn, Woodrow Hall, Woodlawn, AL
Sens-Aktions, Primo Piano Living Gallery, Lecce, Italy
2008
The Show, Bottletree, Birmingham, AL
June Salon, Greencup Books, Birmingham, AL
2006
Foundations student art exhibition, University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL
Erotic Art exhibition, The Strand, Montevallo, AL
2004
Foundations student art exhibition, University of Montevallo, Montevallo, AL
Screenings
2012
Future Reigns, The Macbeth, London, UK
2011
London Underground Film Festival, Horse Hospital, London, UK
2010
London Underground Film Festival, Horse Hospital, London, UK
Loop the Wave Volume 1, Ssamzie Space, Hongdae, South Korea
2009
Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival, Birmingham, AL
2008
Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival, Birmingham, AL
2007
Atlanta Horrorfest, The Eyedrum, Atlanta, GA
Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival, Alabama Power, Birmingham, AL
A Night of Horror Film Festival, Sydney, Australia
2006
Rhode Island Horror Film Festival, Rhode Island
Atlanta Horror Fest, The Eyedrum, Atlanta, GA
Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival, Alabama Power, Birmingham, AL
2005
Birmingham Sidewalk Film Festival, The Harbert Center, Birmingham, AL
Curating Experience
2011
D.C.C.S, Yogiga Gallery, Hongdae, South Korea
Lectures / Presentations / Conferences
2014
Theorizing the Web, Windmill Studios, Brooklyn, NY
Critical Themes/Transgressing Media, Parsons the New School for Design, New York, NY
2013
Critical Themes/Digital | Affect, Parsons the New School for Design, New York, NY
Focus and Motivation, Hunter College, New York, NY
Theorizing The Web, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
Art Exchange, College Art Association annual conference, New York, NY
2010
Sunday Evening Godard, JL Godard Cinema Lounge, Hongdae, South Korea
Publications
2014 Art as Theory, Oranbeg Press, Net 06, June 30th
2013 The Brooklyn Review, Issue No.30, April 26th
2012 The Brooklyn Review, Issue No.29, May 23rd
2011
Horror, LIES/ISLE, Issue No.6, December 5th
SILENCE, LIES/ISLE, Issue No.5, March 29th
2010
Mazes & Labyrinths, LIES/ISLE, Issue No.4, September 15th
MAPS, Mastodonte Editorial,Antioquia, Colombia, South America, August 2nd
The Double, LIES/ISLE, Issue No.3, March 20th
2009
Landscape & Architecture, LIES/ISLE, Issue No.2, December 15th
Bibliography
2007
Antonio Urdiales, Interview with an artist: Mitch Patrick, The Alabamian, Nov 2nd
Collections
2009 Primo Piano Living Gallery Archive, Lecce, Italy
Honors and Awards
2013
The Charles G. Shaw Award, Brooklyn College
The Cerf Award in Art, Brooklyn College
2012
Charles G. Shaw Award, Brooklyn College
Graduate Materials Funding Award, Brooklyn College
2008
Fellowship award, Vermont Studio Center
2007
The Excellence in Drawing Award, University of Montevallo
Special Honors within the College of Fine Arts, University of Montevallo
The Martha Allen Memorial Scholarship, University of Montevallo
2006
First Place, University of Montevallo foundations student art exhibition
The Virginia Barnes emerging artist scholarship, University of Montevallo
2004 to 2007
President’s list, University of Montevallo
Residencies
2008 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
Green_Grounded_Fortune, video, 3d rendering, and sound. 38 second seamless loop. 2014.
Zoomer_37, video, 3d rendering, and sound. 37 second seamless loop. 2014.
Indexical_Weights, video, 3d rendering, and sound. 1 minute 21 second seamless loop. 2014.
Happy_Haptics, video, 3d rendering, and sound. 1 minute seamless loop. 2013.
Safe_House, video, 3d rendering, and sound. 1 minute 50 second seamless loop. 2013.
Catalog, video and digital graphics. 1 minute 20 second seamless loop. 2013.
Int_Medium, video, 3d rendering. Web based flash file, seamless loop. 2012.
All from Rema Hort Mann Foundation on Vimeo.