Mike Patten is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Montreal. Born in 1977 in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, of Cree and European decent, he holds a BFA in painting and drawing with a minor in art history from the University of Regina. Patten has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally and nationally at artist run, commercial, and university galleries including: LOOP international video art Festival, (Barcelona, Spain, 2007), Neutral Ground, (Regina, SK, 2005), Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, (Montreal, QC, 2006) and the University of Bishops, (Lennoxville, QC, 2006).
LOST AND FOUND (2008)
"Patten creates elegant visual puns which catch you unaware. His modified "Exit" sign, for example, gets an existentialist twist by simply adding an "s". It takes most people a few moments to catch on. I also love the two black doors which are perforated with tiny holes. There's a light source inside the doors, turning them into a night sky as the light twinkles through. I guess the universe is flat. [...]" - Bettina Forget
« The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frighten me »
Blaise Pascal
"The sculptures in Mike Patten’s exhibition are sombre and reflect the theme of confinement. Using commonly found objects and simple materials, the artist has created a series of sculptures which convey a desire to escape oneself or a situation, all the while knowing that this is impossible.
His latest work evokes wonderment, dreamlike states and the multitude of possibilities that life offers. In a universe originating in childhood, the objects embody tension, censure. There is a void that is unspoken or badly conveyed, a sense of emptiness, otherworldliness that inhabits within all of us, an echo that we cannot quite retrieve.
Memory and words are central to Patten’s creations and we can follow the patterns from his previous work and in his writings. He puts a lot of effort to make conscious his unconscious thoughts. Words act as a filter for his thoughts which are then transformed into material symbols that can be visualized. By exposing these symbols to the light of day, the lockgate of the mind once opened cannot be closed."
Natalie Guimond
MOTS PERDUS (2006 - )
Montrealer Mike Patten's art relates to the notion of self-censorship. [...] Patten is in the habit of writing personal notes into his hand-held computer using his stylus pen. He then revises his electronic journal and erases personal or embarrassing thoughts, again with a wave of the tiny stylus wand. Several hundred of these pages are projected briefly on a gallery wall. The words become quite abstract, intriguing clusters of black fragments that look like something viewed through a microscope.
A bit more legible is a work printed out on a large piece of paper, upon which we can almost make out the message: "I think about you all the time." Not exactly the words to start a war. Yet, the white fissure cutting the words roughly in half has its own aura of muted violence.
Lehmann, Henry. "Montréal, Read Between Words at Must-See Show ", The Montréal Gazette, April 15, 2006. pE4
MONDRIAN'S GARDEN (2006 - )
Mondrian’s Garden reflects on the medium of painting itself – its intrinsic limits and the dual possibility it offers to both represent the world we evolve in as realistic and as an abstraction. As others have done before him, Mike Patten uses the tools of painting to discuss painting. He plays with the thin line that separates abstraction from realism.
Mondrian’s Garden might first give the impression of an abstract work, due to its minimalist aspect and the obvious references to modernist art and to Barnett Newman in particular, but it embodies the very concrete desire many artists share to reproduce reality, to produce reality. In his installation, Patten uses green masking tape to mimic paint. The choice of colour he makes is especially meaningful when an analogy with Piet Mondrian’s production has been made, as the latter completely avoided the use of green, which he considered to be evocative of nature and landscapes. In the accompanying works from the Ladder series, Patten further questions the notion of reality, as black masking tape is used to render ladder silhouettes onto framed glass, and the shadows thus cast onto the wall.
THE CELEBRITY SERIES (2004 - )
Going to art openings and benefit events, Mike Patten meets with well-known artists in the visual arts scene. Once introduced, Patten takes out a small pocket computer, a Palm-type PDA, makes a quick demonstration, then, with explanations out of the way, asks the artist to improvise a small drawing on the device. Artists are often a little uneasy producing anything on the small screen unprepared, but curiosity and a chance to try out the gadget usually overcome their hesitation. Most accept the challenge, some even take a liking to it. The resulting sketches are as likely to reflect the work and style of the artists who take part as to be surprisingly different from it.
Titled The Celebrity Series, the project began a little more than two years ago; some of the drawings were given a first showing on July 23rd, 2005, at Neutral Ground, in Regina. Patten managed to involve more than three hundred artists, whose sketches can be viewed on-line, on his Web site and blog, at www.mikepatten.ca. Most of the drawings one sees in the collection are by emerging and established artists from Montreal, where Patten lives, including Michel de Broin, Isablelle Hayeur, and Geneviève Cadieux. There are also a large number of drawings by Canadian artists, such as Germain Koh, Rebecca Belmore, and Michael Snow, while some international artists — Orlan, Su-Mei Tse, Ben Vautier — have also contributed to the project.
Drawing has been instrumental in relational art before, and artists involved in social interventions have used drawing as a pretext for engaging the public. As a medium, drawing has the advantage of being accessible to a general audience that may be less familiar with contemporary artistic practices. The fundamentals of drawing are relatively easy to grasp and its language is almost self-evident. Drawing has long formed the basis of artistic training. One has only to recall its role in the development of Western art, in the Italian Renaissance, as in the rivalry between the Florentine and Venetian schools (drawing vs colour), to grasp the enormous influence that drawing has had on distinguishing artist from craftsman.
In The Celebrity Series, however, drawing is not really used to communicate with a general audience, nor to promote relational practices. The Palm Pilot initiative served rather to create contacts with visual artists, especially with those having a certain prominence in the field. Though not uninteresting in their own right, the drawings are not themselves the centre of interest. The project’s significance partly resides in Patten’s talent for involving such a great number of well-known artists. The drawings are the visible trace, evidence of Patten’s encounter with each artist. The project’s goal is to create an interactive network between Patten and the art milieu. Each drawing helps catalogue the encounters Patten has had. It’s also a way of sharing the possibilities of digital art on hand-held devices. In other words, to exist, the project exploits the celebrity of the participating artists while also lending value to their work. For their part, artists whose drawings figure in The Celebrity Series gain visibility — “There’s no such thing as small publicity.” Viewers familiar with the visual arts derive great pleasure from recognizing drawings made by artists whose work they know, as they do from the surprise of discovering drawings that are quite different from the artist’s usual production.
Art has often been criticized for cultivating a fetish for the object, a criticism that extends to the monetary value attributed these objects through commercial speculation. The price of a work of art follows the artist’s celebrity quotient in the Kunst Compass. Big names get the greatest number of entries. The Celebrity Series reminds us of this aspect of the art scene. The project doesn’t focus on criticizing or decrying the correlation of artists’ reputations with the value of their work, but, in a way, using the Hollywood term “celebrity,” Patten’s project highlights the “glamour” aspect of the visual arts world. However, stars in the visual arts need not fear the paparazzi just yet — most people don’t know the names of the leading contemporary artists, let alone recognize them.
In post-modern times, the vast majority of artists have developed an unmarketable artistic production — Land Art, performance, relational art — and turn to public institutions, foundations, and grants to finance their productions. Alongside this type of art, many artists also produce work of “domestic” dimensions that individuals may purchase through specialized galleries. Collectors participate in the artist’s work while acquiring an object for the collection. The possession of “bourgeois” items is no longer the ultimate goal of such purchases; rather, the collector hopes to possess a part of the artist’s notoriety or status. That is why, having bought a painting by Jackson Pollock, for instance, a collector will say of the purchase, “I just bought a Pollock!”
Eloi Desjardins
PALM PILOT DRAWINGS (2004 - )
UNTITLED (2005)
A single swing is installed in an otherwise empty room, and I trace its silhouette on a nearby wall. I then proceed to shift the direction of the light source causing other shadows to appear. I mark their presence with paint and continue this process of building up various shades in the room. I then let the real shadows occupy the same space so that relationships are created between painted images and real objects. At what point do the traces become things in themselves?
BETWEEN THE WALL (2004)
I am interested in the issues and ideas concerning domesticity, gender, and cyclical time. In my recent work I have been experimenting with palimpsest; the process of erasure and layering. I am also exploring the importance of the architectural space that my work inhabits. This ephemeral work reveals these traces of process as it relates to the idea of memory.
THE KING OF REGINA (1999 - 2004)
“The King of Regina Archives” was a project based on a man from Regina, Saskatchewan, often seen shouting nonsensical phrases, racial slurs and threatening comments. The dialogue gathered for this project was put together by interviews and eye witness encounters over a period of five years. The material represented in this project was not intended for harm or defamation, rather my intent was to study an individual whom I found to be a fascinating and complex, human being.
The-King-of-Regina.pdf
THE READER SERIES (2003 - )
In this series of digital prints, Mike Patten juxtaposes text and images that reflect the negative reality of contemporary society with illustrations found in textbooks normally used to teach reading and associated skills to schoolchildren.
mikepatten.ca