NYAB Event - Patte Loper "The Sky is Burning, The Sea Aflame"

Patte Loper "The Sky is Burning, The Sea Aflame"

Lyons Wier Gallery

This event has ended.

Patte Loper's exhibition, The Sky is Burning, The Sea Aflame, describes imagined architectural spaces and draws from sources that include utopian mid-century architectural plans, natural history, taxidermy, vernacular architecture (ranging from duck blinds, contemporary slum dwellings to 19th century explorers' huts), Hudson River Valley painting, love songs of the 1980's, and Ruskin's notions of the "pathetic fallacy" - which attributes human emotion or responses to nature, inanimate objects, or animals.

By using architecture as a metaphor for human imagining and longing, yet refusing to invest the work with grandeur via scale or media, the authoritative voice of the source material is undermined, thus allowing it to maneuver in intuitive and imaginative ways. The results of these investigations can be seen as quiet, lyrical, and intentionally non-heroic proposals for building.

This body of work manifestly employs idiosyncratic, subjective and intuitive decisions both formally and conceptually. To further undercut any possible logic or predictable forms found in these images, the artist choose titles from the lyrics of love songs, songs that talk about a lost love object, of longing and sadness - projected into these fantasy spaces now illogically, poignantly, and sincerely coded with the collective sentimentality of love and loss.