ART ON THE HILL
work by
Patricia Patterson
For InSITE97, the curators selected the artists, then the artists selected the sites where they'd work. Many chose sites in the cultural sector; at places such as museums and the like. Others chose sites in the public sector, parks, government facilities, and transit depots. A few picked sites in the commercial sector, working at places such as stores and restaurants.
Only one artist sought out a site in the largest sector of them all: the private sector. This is something of a surprise because people's homes are one of art's natural resting places; at least for paintings and sculptures.
By entering this world through the perspective of InSITE, with its emphasis on cross-influence between the site and the art, the terms of the relationship between art and the house it's in changes radically.
Patricia Patterson's site consists of three small rooms attached to the home of Marcia and Hector Nunez. Built by Marcia's family in the early 1950s, the house sits on a hillside in Colonia Altamira, a pleasant but somewhat ramshackle neighborhood of old Tijuana.
Patterson and her assistants transformed the site in such a way that entering it feels like walking into a painting; a fulfillment of the idea of painting as "a window to another world."
The primary tool of this transformation is color -- reds, blues, greens, yellows; all of them highly excited hues which are readily available at paint stores south of the border, but nearly impossible to find in the more (evidently) color-anxious north.
Color is everywhere. Outside, on the exterior walls, the picket fence, and the window trim; and inside, on the interior walls, the floor, the furnishings and fabrics Patterson selected for the space, and in the paintings she created to hang within the space. The colors' potentially aggravating intensity is masterfully balanced and the decorative elements are sufficiently few, so there's never a sensation of chaos or distraction.
Movement through the space, from room to room, and from detail to detail, yields a series of snapshot views, each of which suggests itself as the subject of a still life or domestic genre scene.
What Patterson presents at this site is not the confrontation with social and political issues that flavors most of InSITE's offerings, but a warm and appreciative embrace of life lived simply and with modest means.
Because of its unique location and its permanence, the work raises some unlikely and intriguing questions. For example, what impact is the work having in and on its community, which never for a moment imagined anyone spending so much time, attention, and resources making a house look all but perfect? Will neighbors take a cue from Pattern's work and attempt to "upgrade" their properties to this very sophisticated level? If they don't, which is likely, doesn't the work then remain merely the peculiarity that most art is in most people's eyes?
More generally, if art is going to claim a place for itself in residential neighborhoods, should museums open satellite branches in the converted garages and spare bedrooms of people's homes?
All of which raises the more fundamental question, inherent throughout InSITE97: Where does art belong?