MIAMI, FLA.- Pérez Art Museum Miami is presenting ...while the dew is still on the roses…, an immersive exhibition from mixed media artist Ebony G. Patterson. A survey of the artist’s recent work is situated within a visually dense environment designed to recall an overgrown, decadent “night garden.” This site-specific installation—replete with twilight-colored cloth wallpaper, vegetal growths sprouting from the walls and silk leaves, flowers, and vines falling from the ceiling and framing paintings—augments thirteen of the artist’s large-scale works that include videos, drawings, and tapestries, six of which were created for the show.
“For almost five years I’ve been exploring the idea of the garden as both real as imagined, acknowledging its relationship to post-colonial spaces. I am interested in how gardens operate as sites of social demarcation. I investigate their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land, and death,” explains Ebony G. Patterson.
Within the individual works, Patterson puts the black body in direct dialogue with the iconography of the garden, from sites of wild, uncultivated nature to artificially domesticated forms of decorative gardens, and, finally, the idea of the garden as an Edenic primordial space existing outside of culture. The artist sees gardens as sites of splendor, danger, and burial, deftly sifting through the iconography to present floral fields as sites for creating both viability and invisibility, for exploring gender, and as signs of self-respect and protection.
Executed in diverse mediums, these artworks articulate protest and outrage, and act as a critical lament regarding violence perpetrated against these bodies globally. Yet their ire is tempered by the artist’s use of floral patterning to bestow honor and dignity on her subjects, shrouding them in beauty. The references to Carnival in Patterson’s use of beads, plastic ornaments, and reflective materials reflect her interest in mining international aesthetics in a practice that is a race against time, as Patterson captures, mourns, and glorifies the passing of too many lives.
Ebony G. Patterson . . . while the dew is still on the roses . . . is organized by PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander. Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 in Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in Kingston and Lexington, KY) received her BFA from Edna Manley College, Kingston, Jamaica (2004) and MFA from Sam Fox College of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis, MO (2006). Patterson has had solo exhibitions and projects at many US institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2016); Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, GA (2016); and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2016). Dead Treez, Patterson’s large-scale solo show, originated at the Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2015) and traveled to Museum of Art and Design, NY (2015); Boston University Art Galleries, MA (2016); and UB Art Galleries, University at Buffalo, NY (2017). Her work was included in the 32nd São Paulo Bienal: Live Uncertainty (2016); the 12th Havana Biennial: Between the Idea and the Experience, Cuba (2015); Prospect.3: Notes for Now, New Orleans (2014), and the Jamaica Biennial 2014, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. She was a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Rauschenberg Foundation, a 2015 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Art Grant, and her work is included in a number of public collections, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Museum of Art and Design, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; 21c Museum Hotels; and the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. Patterson served on the Artistic Director’s Council for Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017), and will present solo exhibitions at Pérez Art Museum, Miami and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago in 2018.
