Kelda Van Patten was recently interviewed for Talking Pictures by Alasdair Foster. The article, titled "Kelda Van Patten: Still Life with Artifice," investigates the use of simulacra and kitsch within the context of van Patten's work.
"In his ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, Oscar Wilde advises his juvenile reader that “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible”. As with many of Wilde’s epithets, below the camp irony of the one-liner lies a more profound observation. Far back in the evolution of humankind, long before Homo sapiens, there was Homo habilis – the maker. The accelerated development of our hominid ancestors began with the creation and use of tools, extending our natural limitations and eventually taking us to the top of the food chain. With industrialisation and the later technological revolutions, human beings adapted to lives of increasing artificiality.
The artist Kelda Van Patten creates photo-based imagery that disrupts the sedimentation of artifice, artfully confusing the vegetative with the simulation, the object with its image. And yet none of this is natural, all of it is, in a sense, artificial. The flowers of the garden and the fruit of the orchard are hybrid forms coaxed into being through the artifice of horticulture. That said, they are bound to the contract of all living things, that in time they will die and return to the earth. Not so the simulations in Terylene and plastic that will bloom and remain ripe for ever. Less still, the digital images that lie dormant as binary code, to germinate in the printer as lush but insubstantial food for the eyes."
