CAMILLE PATHA: TURN UP THE VOLUME

Exhibition Dates: April 1 - June 11, 2017
Reception Date: Saturday, April 1, 2017 - 1pm

Over the course of her career, Camille Patha has blazed her own path from the start. Color, scale, content -- all fly in the face of the expected. Born and raised in the Northwest, Patha brought back riots of color from her studies at Arizona State University in the 1950s to her undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of Washington in the 1960s, where she challenged the Northwest tradition of subdued subjects and earthbound colors. Patha continued to hone her artistic practice during her subsequent move into large-scale Surrealism, where checkerboards and brick walls appear frequently in stark, silent contrast to the lush elements displayed above or within. Color stayed primary when Patha returned to pure abstraction, a direction she has pursued with focus and through a variety of stylistic means since the late 1980s.

Patha's color palette has also changed, and reflects a depth where before there was an emphasis on the surface of the abstract works, despite their layered punches of color. Now, even the smaller works contain infinite dimensionality with their lines of color that swirl, recede, and advance. This infusion of movement into the static finds its most dramatic expression in her large-scale painting Collective Voices, where a cloak of thick, concentrated, mixed, jeweled colors hover over the white surface of the canvas beneath. It's as though all that has come before in Patha's collective memory of shapes, styles, and colors, has found expression here, where she makes the grid bend to her will, serve as support, hold up the looming forms. And what are these forms? Clouds? Storms? Quilts? Paint palettes? If her painting is a metaphor, they can be all of those things, and more.

Now, after more than fifty years devoted to painting, Patha returns to the grid in pursuit of what she calls "structured energy." Bright forms studded with dark specks, grids as nets, windows, or structures to be transcended, pushed through, modeled upon: could these latest works be considered metaphors for Patha's experience, the culmination of all that has come before in her devotion to painting? The large canvases, with their dense, highly textured surfaces and moody palettes give us the sense of an artist interested in the place beyond abstraction, towards a purity unconcerned with traditional notions of beauty.