Pat Oleszko

David Peter Francis is pleased to present Pat's Imperfect Present Tense, New York-based artist Pat Oleszko’s first exhibition with the gallery, and first solo show in New York City since 1990. The exhibition re-surfaces pivotal performances, inflatables, and videos from 1972 to the current day, foregrounding the artist’s life-long endeavor towards absurdity.

Working in disregard for any and all divide, Oleszko’s practice bleeds into everything— this survey of works pulls largely from decades-deep hordes of worn-sculptures from the artist’s extensive oeuvre. These costumes appear as the attractors in performances as well as characters in her video works, further seducing the viewer through a rigorous and developed language of pun populating Pat’s planet.

Oleszko arrived at using herself as her armature early on. The artist described a “eureka moment” following consistent inevitable collapses of her early sculptural work, realizing that the body could be used as a platform to stand up to the challenge, where no proper welds were necessary. Her use of her own body as the work’s conduit emerged equally her own performance origins as a burlesque dancer. Works like The Handmaiden (1975) instrumentalize humor, poking and prodding while simultaneously situating itself amongst feminist critiques of power and sexual dynamics— the exaggeration of our cultural obsession (and fear) surrounding sex. In the same way that a garment or costume is a holder for the body, the self as vessel provides fertile ground for play and/or debasement of human civilization as a whole, whatever the particular butt of the joke may be.

Following her awarding of the Rome Prize in 1998, Oleszko spent a night in jail for the very work for which she was awarded: her role as spectacular sculptress provocateur— this time incarnated as The Nincompope, a facsimile of the papacy paraded through the streets of Vatican City to the ire of the polizia. Through Pat’s play, we can begin to grasp a consequence of comedy—the result is either neglected entirely or is placed at the forefront. It could be a failure to assimilate or, it could be freedom.

Pat Oleszko (b. 1947, Detroit) received her BFA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since the early 1970s, she has staged exhibitions and performances at institutions such as Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Performance Space 122 (New York), Museum of Contemporary Craft (now Museum of Art and Design, New York), P.S. 1 (Queens), Lincoln Center (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Civitella Ranieri (Umbertide, Italy), Neuberger Museum (Purchase), Rauschenberg Foundation (Captiva), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington D.C.), and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut (New York); amongst others. She was the recipient of the Rome Prize in 1998, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990. Oleszko lives in works in New York City.