Paintings from the Collection

Ten Centuries that Shaped the West, oil on linen, 2014

from the Collection of the Smith College Museum of Art, oil on linen, 2014

Paintings from the Collection
October 17 – November 22, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, October 17

Paintings from the Collection features new paintings by Jehra Patrick, created in culmination of an 18-month-long research project made possible by the Next Step Fund grant, funded by the McKnight Foundation and awarded by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.

For this project, Patrick traveled to national art museums, where she engaged in deep research within their digital and photographic archives, with emphasis on those archival resources depicting past exhibition presentation preparation, and documentation. From these institutional archives, Patrick forms her own visual cache from reproduced and transferred files - making note of institutional record-keeping, artist trajectories, exhibition topics, presentation trends, and the various nature of peripheral activities towards exhibition production.

From this archive, the artist selects and edits images, honing in on interior compositions through digital cropping, reorienting and juxtaposing files, and layering documents. She then produces oil paintings after these images’ likenesses, often incorporating qualities native to her photographic and digital sources. The final suite of painted objects is serves as a diagram of visual metadata from museum architecture, art presentation, and traditional painting composition, often sighting ‘paintings within paintings,’ remarking on the referential history of Painting. Patrick initiated, and continues the series, as a pragmatic way to both capture and recall Painting’s lengthy past and promote possibility for its future within classical perimeters.

The title of the exhibition, Paintings from the Collection, exhibition refers to a common subtitle for group exhibitions themed around an institution’s permanent collection. In this case, referring to both to the origin of the painting’s subjects, which have been extracted from the permanent records of various institutions, to the artists own growing collection of such material, as well as the notion of an artist’s body of work serving as their own ‘collection.’

The exhibition is welcomed by an opening reception on Friday, October 17, from 6-8 pm, and is on view through November 22nd, 2014.