DUBLIN.- Ellis King is presenting Grear Patterson’s Cereal Eater. Patterson’s practice draws upon fragmentary information from popular culture and his own life to produce works that play with the fungibility of identity, autobiography, and personal inquest. In sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings, videos, and photographs, Patterson engages images and objects in a very physical, visceral manner. His closed circuit anarchy always calls authority, especially his own, into question. Desire and entropy both shape and reveal his work. For him, meaning is situational and, unstuck; it can evolve, change, acclimatise, and deteriorate. Positing cerebral concepts from psychology, philosophy, and art theory against kitschy media, awkward adolescent scenarios, and rudimentary renderings, Grear Patterson’s practice works against art’s hierarchical history as it expands its breadth.
Patterson’s Cereal Eater continues his confrontation with his own identity and personal history. The work results from the absurd and obsessive mining of the artist's past, as he recalls details of his childhood, reconstructing characters and locations, while recycling materials of his own memory and belonging. In its comic futility, the work is both diversely unpredictable and rigorously logical.
Taking prominence in Cereal Eater is a nucleus collection of twenty new sculptures in diverse media that reconstruct memories of the artist’s adoloescence. Here, Patterson scrutinises moments of ritual and tradition by restaging scenes common in American adolescence investigating the moral and experiential subtexts of these junctures in the process. These new sculptures, arranged in a continuous rectangular format, are organised according to ever-morphing and evolving categories. Combining personal objects and popular cultural ephermera, they allude to folk art and assemblage art traditions incorporating household objects, children’s toys, walkie talkies, cookie jars, pinball machines, collectibles, taxidermied geese feet, video games, love letters, and a multitude of recycled trinkets.
Cereal Eater includes a new series composed of enlarged and customised mulit-panelled Printed Circuit Boards (PCB’s) utilised in electronic computing devices and technology. Referencing retro video gaming and many a mispent youth in gaming arcades, Patterson utilises these components to suggest informally cohesive personal scenarios comprising fantasy, romance, mystery, and adolescent rites of passage.
Upon close inspection of the exhibtion, one might attain the feeling that Patterson has an acute sense of the vacuous possibility inherent in such objects, and of the intricate flows that take place in these act of transference. While his practice makes blatant use of pop cultural swipes, found ephemera (personal or otherwise), and broad tropes, the artworks still manage to feel both unsettling and intimately familiar.
There is something more, though, to Patterson’s privy stage-like props arranged to create temporal, self-consuming conjurings of kitsch sublime. It feels all too personal because it’s scrappy, aspirational, and unresloved; taking the nostalgic stock characters and adolescent stories experienced by many of us and using them as ciphers for a larger idea, imaginative proxies for an unreachable great beyond; of opportunity, hope, and, indeed, the American Dream. Any number of characterisations, materials and objects then become supple cultural readymades for his to stage for us and, most pertinently, for himself.
