Daisy Patton: Imaginary Homelands at UMass Amherst

13 September - 9 December 2024

Koslov Larsen is thrilled to highlight Daisy Patton's two-person show with painter Alicia Brown at UMass Amherst: Imaginary Homelands, on view September 13 – December 9, 2024. 

 

In Imaginary Homelands, the body becomes a vessel for storytelling, exploring identity, diaspora, place, and time. Inspired by Dutch master portraiture, Alicia Brown’s gorgeously decorated figures pose as a pointed connection to the history of the Caribbean and colonialism. Patton’s focus on women from the Southwest Asia and Northern Africa region speaks to her efforts to (re)connect with Iranian culture and the interiority of women’s lives which often go unrecognized despite how they carry forward family histories.

 

Patton’s paintings echo the ornateness found in Iranian art and architecture to attempt to slowly dissolve the imposter syndrome she felt by not growing up with her Iranian family, with the hopes of restoring and building something that can never truly be complete, never what could have been. In Brown’s work, her paintings of her family members demonstrate familial bonds and histories over time that have been preserved despite immigration and adaptation. The poignant narratives within her work takes the viewer on a journey that delves into the intersection of identity, memory, and belonging, shedding light on the intricate tapestry of a diasporic experience shaped by both nostalgia and forging of new, imaginative homelands. For both artists, belonging wholly encompasses the physical and intangible, of time, place, family, and culture.

 

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

  • Imaginary Homelands
    Daisy Patton, Untitled (Nagah, the Muslim woman Nabla Al-Huda Abu Haja Young Muslims), 2024

    Imaginary Homelands

    What happens to those who leave their former homelands? The vast changes and adaptation to a new place are often coupled with forced assimilation and erasure for them and their descendants. These people must find themselves anew, navigating the tensions of being engulfed by this different terrain while still clutching fragments of themselves in their former lives.
  • Influenced by the ornate intricacies of Persian miniature paintings, Patton uses bright colors and altar-like frames to honor the formerly living subjects adorned within each painting, signifying a vibrant kind of after-life. Each painted photograph is a demonstration of the fracture of time—visitations of people neither fully living nor fully gone and forgotten. These slippages of time mimic how diaspora relive and revisit their former lives in their minds, where the present is a complex array of being. Patton’s focus on women from the Southwest Asia and Northern Africa (SWANA) region speaks to her efforts to (re)connect with Iranian culture, as well as to the interiority of women’s lives that are often unrecognized and erased, despite how they carry forward family histories.
  • Disconnection and forgetting over time can result in a loss of self, with each artist resisting these forms of assimilation...
    Daisy Patton, Untitled (Three Women with Dandelion and Wild Rose Vines), 2024

    Disconnection and forgetting over time can result in a loss of self, with each artist resisting these forms of assimilation and erasure. Many migrations begin from conflict, economic or ecological disaster or even desire—the spaces these people inhabit become contested space, their bodies contested as well. Imaginary Homelands speculates what happens when those truths are acknowledged and allowed to unfurl and blossom into lineages and futures full of care and joy.

  • Photographed by Stephen Petegorsky (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Photographed by Stephen Petegorsky (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Photographed by Stephen Petegorsky (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Photographed by Stephen Petegorsky (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Photographed by Stephen Petegorsky (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    Photographed by Stephen Petegorsky

  • Excerpts above are from statement for Imaginary Homelands.
  • ABOUT THE ARTIST
    ABOUT THE ARTIST

    Daisy Patton is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Los Angeles, CA to a white mother from the American South and an Iranian father she never met. She spent her childhood moving between California and Oklahoma, deeply affected by these conflicting cultural landscapes and the ambiguous absences within her family. Influenced by collective and political histories, Patton explores storytelling and story-carrying, the meaning and social conventions of families, and what shapes living memory. Her work also examines in-between spaces and identities, including the fallibility of the body and the complexities of relationship and connection. 


    Currently residing in western Massachusetts, Patton has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including a solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado, the Chautauqua Institution and the Fulginitti Pavilion at the Center for Bioethics at the Anschutz Medical Campus, as well as group shows with Spring/Break NYC, the Katonah Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, the International Museum of Science and Art, among others. She has paintings held in public and private collections such as the Denver Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, Seattle University, Fidelity Investments Art Collection, and in international airport Hartsfield-Jackson with Delta Airlines, among others. Patton's work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, Transition Magazine, The Denver Post, The Chautauquan Daily, The Seattle Met, and more. Minerva Projects Press has published Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton, a book with essays and poetry on Patton's practice that debuted spring 2021. 

    Patton has completed artist residencies at Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, Minerva Projects, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has been awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, an Assets for Artists Massachusetts Matched Savings grant, a Montage Travel Award from SMFA for research in Dresden, Germany, as well as longlisted for the Aesthetica Prize 2022. She earned her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program, and has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree.