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•  MAY SPOTLIGHT  •


Patte Loper
 
Quiet Country

Platform is pleased to present the second part of
Patte Loper’s ongoing project Quiet Country


This work owes a debt to New Materialists scholars whose research spans biology, philosophy, and feminist anthropology, particularly Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. Their work has taught me much about human and multispecies entanglement. They question the centrality of ”Enlightenment Man”, the idea that places each human individual at the center of their own universe, creates us in the image of a disembodied eye centered in an imperial world of Cartesian geometry. It is this that separates us from the living world and allows us to see our surroundings as a resource to be consumed rather than a series of living, intertwined entities that support life on Earth. The devices, maps, and actions I am creating are part of a long slow process of unlearning what I have been taught about death, time, and being in the world.

Quiet Country 2021, installation view

This project is in an early phase and I expect it will transform a great deal in coming months. This work has begun with close observation of native plant populations and nonhuman interactions. My hope is to encounter corporeal life and material phenomenon in a new way, but to also access an older way of knowing, but one that’s largely been forgotten, that recognizes that native growing plants organize their own holobiomes, regulate bacteria, insect, and animal populations. Many of these plants produce chemicals that are anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial for humans as well as animals, birds, and other plants. Almost all of the local plants I’ve identified in the cemetery are edible for humans and contain beneficial medicinal properties. My ultimate goal is to learn from the plant’s capacity for decision making and movement, and to try to understand their connection to us.
Plant Communication Device 2021 (in process) , artificial flowers from All Faiths Cemetery, cement, water, stone from soil displaced by gravediggers, papier-mâché, spray paint, wood, cardboard, recycled jars, water, leeks, 18h x 12w x 12d inches

Patte Loper is an interdisciplinary artist based in painting who experiments with sculpture and video to explore a range of subject matter including feminist utopianism, new materialism, and the ecological imaginary. She was born in Colorado and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, a subtropical college town where she first developed an appreciation for the ways nature and culture can overlap. She currently lives and works in New York City and Boston, MA, where she is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Licini Museum (Ascoli Piceno, Italy), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), and Suyama Space (Seattle, WA). Her work has been reviewed in the Italian edition of Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and is in the collections of the Rene di Rosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Hirshhorn Museum. She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and was a participant in the Drawing Center's Open Sessions Program 2014-2016.

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