Artist: Grear Patterson
Exhibition title: Cereal Eater
Venue: Ellis King, Dublin, Ireland
Date: May 13 – June 17, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Ellis King, Dublin
Ellis King is delighted to present 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.
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2017, installation view, Ellis King, Dublin
Grear Patterson, Naked Beach, 2017, Painted fabric in original frame, 30 x 38 x 2 cm (11 3/4″ x 14 1/2″ x 3/4″)
Grear Patterson, Cereal Eater, 2005, Digital video with audio, 5 minutes 30 seconds, Dimensions variable
Grear Patterson, Paramount Hotel, 2017, Cereal boxes, 34 x 120 x 14 cm (13 3/8″ x 47 1/4″ x 5 1/2″)
Grear Patterson, Super Computy Division, 2017, Printed circuit boards on aluminium, 171 x 114 x 6 cm (67 3/8″ x 44 7/8″ x 2 3/8″)
Grear Patterson, Family Computer, 2017, Printed circuit boards on aluminium, 171 x 114 x 6 cm (67 3/8″ x 44 7/8″ x 2 3/8″)
Grear Patterson, Galaga, 2017, Printed circuit boards on aluminium, 171 x 114 x 6 cm (67 3/8″ x 44 7/8″ x 2 3/8″)
Grear Patterson, July 20, 1969, 2017, Printed circuit boards on aluminium, 171 x 114 x 6 cm (67 3/8″ x 44 7/8″ x 2 3/8″)
Grear Patterson, René Carmille, 1969, 2017, Printed circuit boards on aluminium, 171 x 114 x 6 cm (67 3/8″ x 44 7/8″ x 2 3/8″)
Grear Patterson, Neville Maskelyne, 1969, 2017, Printed circuit boards on aluminium, 171 x 114 x 6 cm (67 3/8″ x 44 7/8″ x 2 3/8″)
Grear Patterson, Jeff Garnue, 1969, 2017, Printed circuit boards on aluminium, 171 x 114 x 6 cm (67 3/8″ x 44 7/8″ x 2 3/8″)
Grear Patterson, Eyes Oven Fresh, 2017, Plastic‘Cookie Monster’ Cookie jar and pocket telescope on pedestal, 151 x 41 x 41 cm (59 1/2″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, When Mom Yells at Dad, 2017, Wooden toy plane, plasic ‘Troll’ Doll on pedestal, 145 x 41 x 41 cm (57 1/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Freeport Cereal, 2017, Army figurine, ‘Atlantis’ pen, ‘Aviator’ poker cards, plastic ‘Count, Chocula’figurine on pedestal, 143 x 41 x 41 cm (56 1/4″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Battle of Antietam, 2017, Novelty ‘Coca-Cola’ bottle, flint spear head, gold bar, lego,, monopoly house, toy solider figurines on pedestal, 179 x 41 x 41 cm (70 1/2″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Blue Wrench Noodles in December, 2017, Model car and tow-truck, Michael Jordan basketball card Chicago Bulls night-light, switchboard, ceramic sculpture or noodles & suspended chopsticks on pedestal, 142 x 41 x 41 cm (55 7/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Harrison’s Broken Arm, 2017, Mailbox, china teacup, plastic solider figurines on pedestal, 149 x 41 x 41 cm (58 5/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, I Really Didn’t Want to Shoot You, 2017, Wooden model house, Canadian goose feet on pedestal, 151 x 41 x 41 cm (59 1/2″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, You’re Not Alone, 2017, ‘General Electric’ walkie talkie on pedestal, 159 x 41 x 41 cm (62 5/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Cookie for Aristotle (1695 Year Old Cookie), 2017, ‘Pillsbury Dough Boy’ ceramic cookie jar on pedestal, 154 x 41 x 41 cm (60 5/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, When a Tiger Likes You, 2017, Baseball hat and plastic figurines on pedestal, 130 x 41 x 41 cm (51 1/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Enjoying Being Alone, 2017, Chapel Hill Summer Swim Meet Ribbon, ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ mini Pinball Machine on pedestal, 136 x 31 x 41 cm (53 1/2″ x 12 1/4″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Blackjack, Not Chess, 2017, Plastic figurines, mini metal helicopter, camplight (metal & glass) matches, olfa touch-knife, marvel comic card on pedestal, 134 x 41 x 41 cm (52 3/4″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Me or You, 2017, Solider figurines, ‘Nintendo Mario Brothers’ entertainment system, headphones on pedestal, 129 x 41 x 41 cm (50 3/4″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Little Princess, 2017, Plastic figurines & animals, elephant soft toy, model Batmobile, softball cards, ribbon on pedestal, 131 x 41 x 41 cm (51 5/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Alone in the Explorer’s Club, 2017, Model tank, solider figurine, gamecard, atlas book on pedestal, 131 x 41 x 41 cm (51 5/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, No Mountain, 2017, Grape lollipop, ‘Varsity Blues’ VHS tape, Carolina Panthers sticker sheet, baseball card, model car on pedestal, 140 x 41 x 41 cm (55 1/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Ever Ready, 2017, 10 dollar note, wooden ‘Budweiser’ mini baseball bat & baseball, tin torch, model mini plane on pedestal, 147 x 41 x 41 cm (57 7/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Playing at Grandma’s, 2017, ‘Club Milk’ bar and wrapper, china tea cup, model cars, tin ‘Lucky Strike’box on pedestal, 131 x 41 x 41 cm (51 5/8″ x 16 1/8″ x 16 1/8″)
Grear Patterson, Spaghetti Westerns and Nights Alone, 2017, Wholegrain and honey-nut cheerios, Dimensions variable
Grear Patterson, Always Room For You, 2016, Teddy bears, baseballs, Dimensions variable