Patrick Carrara & Janet Passehl

For Patrick Carrara and Janet Passehl, a completed work of art is the final moment captured in a series of repeated gestures, performed over time. The smallest variations invite shifts in perception, as they pay strict attention to their materials. Both artists create physical boundaries, which become the stages upon which a rigorous process of consciousness, layering, folding, pressing, and draping invite us to come in for a closer look.

Our Flat Files are curated, and change with every exhibition. We are pleased to feature new sculptures and drawings by Kurt Steger and Jesse Hickman.

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Patrick Carrara

Born in Nice, France Patrick Carrara began his studies in visual arts in Paris. Upon completing his studies at the Fine and Graphic Arts school, he crossed the vast breadth of the Sahara. Then his journeying took him to the other side of the Atlantic, where he traveled north through Central America to Mexico and the United States. He traveled light, but never without his leather briefcase in which he carried paper, colored pencils, and pen. They were, the tools of his trade, the instruments of his art, and rare was the time that he was not putting them to creative use.

When he returned to Paris, he established himself fully as a painter and illustrator. But he soon realized that the center of the art world was the city of New York.

He moved to Brooklyn, NY where he currently resides.

Traveling is one of the best ways to nourish our soul. Moving to New York helped him to find a balance between geometry and minimalism in his work.

In his current series Appearance, begun seven years ago, Patrick Carrara uses black ink on Mylar, layering thousands of lines freehand, spreading the ink by lightly touching the Mylar’s surface line after line. In Carrara’s mind this process replicates the density of information we take in every day.

By changing a single detail (or very few) in a highly complex pattern, Carrara leaves us open to discover that these small variations modify and alter each individual work and our perception of them.

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Janet Passehl

Janet Passehl is moved by how Hokusai treats rain: arrays of carefully drawn long vertical or slanting lines that exist strongly as both marks and illusion. In rendering something fleeting so concretely, Hokusai brings his rain to Eliot’s “still point of the turning world.” As viewers, we are privy to the inconceivable: the eternal present. Slashing rain brings pathos and intimacy to Hokusai’s pictures, as human figures—pedestrians twisting under blowing umbrellas, fishermen rowing their boats hard— are also held in suspension.

Drawing, especially line with its immediacy and potency, is at the heart of the artist’s work. The four pieces in this show continue an ongoing collaboration with space, light, gravity, and the nature of woven fabric. The cloth is plain and her interaction with it simple. “Material knows more than I do, so in the studio I act less and watch more.’

Passehl’s concern in the studio is not to make a “work of art” but to pay attention to the changing conditions in a continuum of moments as she interacts with her chosen materials. A piece is “finished” when it seems to contain all the moments.

Janet Passehl is an artist and poet whose work has been exhibited on three continents. Although her influences are wide-ranging, she is frequently associated with first-generation “minimalists” and has been shown alongside Agnes Martin, Marcia Hafif, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin, and others.

In 2013 her ironed cloth was featured in the survey Art & Textile: Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art from Klimt to the Present, at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany.

Passehl’s work is in several private collections as well as teaching museums such as the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Passehl’s first full-length poetry collection, Clutching Lambs, was published in 2014 by Negative Capability Press.