PATTI OLEON

The labyrinthine museum seemed to go on endlessly; I became lost in each corridor as they emptied into a continuing series of chambers. I happened into a cluster of strange interconnected rooms that were isolated from the rest of the museum and the rest of the world. They were ornate, little pieces of a residence inside a formidable masonry institution; they were self-contained, and they were perfect.

The rooms were perfect replicas of another point in time. There were windows at the outer reaches of the rooms that were each illuminated by a strange opaque cool light. The light obliterated any chance of seeing beyond the surface of the windows and it made everything else in the rooms appear warm by comparison; it was dreamlike, indeterminate, artificial. Curiously, the light didn't enter the room, it didn't affect the room in any way, but it framed the room like the curtains framed the windows. The furniture was placed meticulously just so, not as if a person had just left the room, but frozen and lifeless and vaguely disturbing. The rooms were void of human presence but about human presence, like a diorama with no participants.

The rooms spoke to me about the passing of time, and that this moment is a moment frozen; I could be standing in the space where someone else stood, where someone else was once alive. I felt as if I were standing on a straight line in space with different points along it; time as a dimension, and this was one infinitesimal speck along that corridor. The frozen quality of the space was a frightening marker of passing time.

It was this scene in a fabricated environment that became the subject of the paintings for me. I was moved to depict the depiction: the uncanny artifice of the set contrived to look so real but was merely a depiction of a time and place that is gone; one idea of the reality of a room, one idea of what it was like to be alive a moment ago.

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I create my paintings from photographs I take of interiors of public spaces; hotel lobbies, period rooms in museums, spaces contrived to look habitable but resolutely lacking human presence. In these photographs I intentionally distort the actual physical reality by using very slow (disjunctive) film in available and largely artificial light with a hand-held camera, editing while photographing, composing intersections of light and forms from sections of these spaces. I then paint what the camera has recorded, including oddities of reflected light. There is a shallow depth of field and a great shift in focus across a narrow plane, which further distorts the actual environment. They contain both the specificity of detail and the void of the spaces. Because these contrived environments are rendered faithfully but cropped and decontextualized they are unidentifiable, and exist as a liminal environment, suggesting that even the most lucid presentation of facts is distorted, incomplete, provisional. The images play on the edge between realism and illusion, in that tension between what one knows and what cannot be identified.

In my research for my latest work, I traveled with a Hollywood location scout searching for evocative interiors that could serve as the basic images for my paintings. Working with my photographs, I then edit, enhance, and at times double the images in Photoshop before bringing the image to the panels. The final paintings are an amalgam of contradictions, blurring the line between the real and the artificial, the dark and the light, and the banal and the transcendent.

I use traditional painting techniques to create paintings that reference the past yet are firmly rooted in the present. Despite their seeming realism based in optical observation, the works are clearly the result of seeing through a lens. This is especially clear in the way light is treated. The light refracts, blurs, and creates auras in a way that our eyes, with their auto focus, never do, but which is a common conceit of photography.