Daisy Patton: With Hands Clasped Tightly

"Family makes photographers and subjects of us all. We carefully select our favorites and share them with loved ones, telling each other stories of things we never knew (when grandma was a bombshell, when dad had a full head of hair) and things we hope to never forget (how we cared for our younger sibling, the birth of a first child). Daisy Patton’s exhibition, With Hands Clasped Tightly, is a thoughtful exploration of the generational ties recorded by photographs, as well as the relationships between family members. Patton’s elaborate and exuberant painted additions, applied with the tender care befitting a treasured heirloom, literally highlight the relationships between each photograph’s subjects, inviting us to imagine their histories and reflect on our own.

The project is a deeply personal one for Patton. As she paints on the photographs abandoned by other families, the artist works through the traumas and joys in her own familial relationships. She illuminates for us what has been denied to her. Patton’s maximalist application of painted decoration gives the photographed subjects new life, making people who lived in disparate corners of the world, long forgotten by their families, long ago shuffled from the mortal coil, into her family—into our family—in the here and now. Patton takes the responsibility seriously, painting an array of stages in life and types of relationships. Families brand new and deeply rooted: loving sisters, complicated matriarchs, tender relationships with fathers. She welcomes us to read whatever we want or need into them. There is something for everyone.

Patton’s paintings are productively overwhelming, demanding a close viewing that ultimately leads us to form relationships with the photographed subjects. Her use of meticulous floral patterns and vibrant colors bring vibrancy to the photographs, resurrecting the families within, bringing them out into the viewer’s space. Moreover, by painting photographs from disparate periods and cultures, Patton not only collapses linear time, she also emphasizes the perennial and universal nature of the familial experience. At the same time, no two paintings are the same, underscoring how every family is unique, beautiful and entangled in its own way. Even the frames, a fairly recent development in Patton’s practice, are part of this experience. Sometimes thematically related to the photograph they encompass, sometimes not, they are always artworks in their own right. She has painted them on all sides, even on the bottom edge of the largest paintings, which none but the most dedicated viewer will ever see. This attention to detail underscores that the frames are integral to the works, intended to make visible the idea that each painting is a portal to the sacred. Altars of a sort, the frames are more akin to the intricately carved woodwork of the Baroque period than the sleek metal frames of today."

— Dr. Ximena A. Gómez on the work of Daisy Patton  (Excerpt from exhibition catalog)