Let Our Beauty Ease Your Grief

New Work by Patte Loper

May 11 to June 17, 2025

For her solo show at Platform Gallery, Patte has investigated what it means to take a fleeting cultural moment, such as a film still or a photo from a magazine article and to slow it down, analyze it, render it carefully, and to ultimately make it her own. The work is a meditation on various forms of expression and the compression and expansion of time.

On exhibition are large-scale oil-on-paper paintings carefully executed with imagined and richer detail than the source material, which include stills from the films North by Northwest and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The results reveal Patte's attempts at understanding and owning the cultural landscape she grew up within. These paintings are a kind of staged projection of fantasies, desires, anxieties, and aspirations which feature the presence of deer inhabiting spaces cleared of humans.

Also in the exhibition are small graphite drawings which are based on photographs of work-in-progress by sculptors Robert Morris and Alan Saret which illustrated an article from a 1970 Artforum magazine. The resulting drawings become a document of the bricolage of irrational messiness and randomness-as-strategy. The stark images of these artists' sculptures in the state of construction share the drawing space with carefully rendered newborn baby fawns which soften the harshness of minimalism-in-the-making and brings the older artists' work back to nature.

A third component of the exhibition is an animation appropriated from a David Attenborough nature documentary and set to Sonic Youth performing Steve Reich's 1969 composition Pendulum Music for 3 or more microphones, amps & loudspeakers (from SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century, 1999). The confluence of the staged elements in the nature documentary and the randomness of the sound created by microphones swinging from a ceiling embody the conversation between the two modes of expression demonstrated in the other work in the show.

Patte's work has been exhibited in California, New York, Boston, and in Seattle, including the 2001 and 2002 Northwest Annuals. She holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently living in New York and teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.


Gallery hours: Thursday through Saturday, 11 AM until 5:30 PM or by appointment