Jehra Patrick

Region: Midwest

Website: http://jehrapatrick.com

City / State: Minneapolis, MN

Driven by my genuine interest in painting—as a discipline, an object, and a history—I see art-institutional structures as responsible for shaping the conditions of the medium’s relevance and production. Experiencing the museum as an artist, I view exhibition, collection, interpretation, and preservation as activities that determine art’s trajectory. I acknowledge this framework—and the artist’s reciprocal relationship with the museum—as an aesthetic and political site.

Taking the museum as my subject matter, I seek to extend this reference to the objects of the museum: paintings. I mine museum spaces and archives for visual resources that document museum operations and histories, selecting compositions from art-historical and museological research. I then produce paintings that incorporate diachronic allusions to movements and artists, as well as depict the illusionary space and flat-screen evenness of my source images. The resulting paintings form an expanding personal index that intervenes on institutional narratives, replying with new museal objects.