This reception will take place October 16th 6-8pm.

Grief is an emotion often seen as taboo in contemporary American culture, unruly and sometimes frightening to behold. And yet, to ignore grief is to deny the love we feel, which can result in curdled anger. In Breathing By the Wound, Daisy Patton sources photographs of mourning from various times and places and re-presents them in bloom. An adult child posing with photos of their deceased parents, a woman holding a photo of a baby no longer alive—all these images show how those in mourning carry forward memories of lost loved ones into the present and beyond. Their losses linger beyond their own time, speaking to ours.

Alongside her re-presentations of historic photographs, Patton includes her own pictures of people who lost loved ones due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. The deliberate erasure of this pandemic and its effects on our world has, like the 1918 flu pandemic before it, led to a rise of authoritarianism and acceptance of mass death. Honoring the memory of those we have lost is one way to refuse eugenics and the harms caused by the abandonment of public health. Grief is a call to action, to remember and to care—Breathing By the Wound invites viewers to commune with those who have lost and rekindle their own feelings, remembering that we are all connected in our humanity.

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. Patton 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.

This exhibition will run October 3-November 7.