ISSUE 02
Father Time
I’m occupying space that those museums don’t even think about, you know what I mean? A lot of the museums think about public outreach, and they do programming to do that, but I like the fact that my work is in the window and it’s something you can see from the street.
KENNY
I wanted to talk about the neon work because that is a lot of what people associate you with even though there are a lot of other things I want to talk about. But I think the thing about your neon work I’m interested in is it as a study of the city. And thinking about the language of using neons.
I think when you get beyond the aesthetic of it and you understand what you’re trying to say about the city and the observations you’re making about neon signage as a way of speaking to the city in the kind of in-between hours when you not see them but feel them from, I don’t know, 2 to 6am in that kind of stillness in the city, what it feels like to me that you’re doing in the work is sort of subverting the language of capitalism and the things that I think that signage can represent in the ways that our cities are even designed. How our businesses have to always have those things on even in the middle of the night in order to sell something in order to survive.
Really what I’m fascinated by in your perspective through neon is less the aesthetic and more who you’re trying to reach by using that aesthetic and flipping that kind of high-key capitalism into beauty and by using language of the people and language of protest to try to show a different landscape of this city.
PATRICK
Right. I mean it’s definitely something when I saw and started kind of observing them, I thought about sculptures first. And then knowing that neon is, like, seductive in its medium. But I was thinking about that community aesthetic that it’s coming from. The signage that I’m referencing is something that has to do with advertising but it’s not print advertising, it’s not TV or, you know, movie advertising. It’s not anything that’s associated with something that people kind of gather as like this thing that feels like an ad agency did that.
This was kind of a mom-and-pop kind of community aesthetic, which I enjoyed, so I felt like I could take that and kind of flip it into something where I was speaking to the passerby. And also that the neon was something that felt like the way that it was presented was urgent. And it wasn’t anything trying to be too cute or too, kind of like, sexy. It was just kind of straightforward. And I appreciated that in the advertising in these mom-and-pop shops. And them putting them in their windows kind of like top to bottom. I looked at it as new sculpture or just something I could play with. And yeah, it was something that was specific to socioeconomic areas—places I was interested in because they were the places that I was around or was living in.
I felt that finding discarded or discounted things was always something I was interested in creating something new from or asking the viewer to look again or just kind of participate in the—
Robert Rauschenberg always mentioned that he felt that people weren’t really experiencing their environments, you know? They were living in them but they weren’t experiencing them. And the work that I make, what I try to represent in the materials, the painting, the sculpture, what’s in them, is slowing down—kind of having to look.
KENNY
Yeah. And when you approached your neon work, were you trying to subvert some of the ways you grew up in this city understanding it and trying to process it yourself and flipping that?
PATRICK
I think that language that I’m trying to hijack or subvert is just kind of wanting to speak to friends, family, cousins, uncles, and making it personal in that sense. And getting their attention with things that might feel familiar to them.
The Pee Chee folders, the neons, all that stuff is in that realm of just—the inspiration doesn’t live far, you know what I mean? It’s kind of reacting to the lived environment and relates to the environment that’s around. And finding materials, inspiration, all that stuff, when I hear from my brother or I hear from my friends or I hear from my dad. Those are the things that I react to. And knowing that does definitely kind of inject it with certain language, certain things that people needed to hear, some things that we spoke about—discussions that trigger the neons and the messages in them.
KENNY
Yeah and I think having them kind of stacked up against each other gives that sense of what you’re trying to say about the city versus—even though I know on their own it is alluring like you said. Neon as just a medium has a sort of—it draws you in just by what it is. But I think seeing it in the context of, like, the LA Plaza exhibition and understanding that it really is a form of pattern-making in a way with the materials of the city itself. And the ways that you see it when they’re all stacked up in what you’re trying to say and a way of seeing the city itself.
PATRICK
Yeah, it’s a landscape in itself, right? In the LA Plaza installation—whenever I get that sort of, when they give me that green light to kind of fill a space like that, when it’s public works—obviously it’s in a window, right? That’s the ultimate kind of context because that’s where I discovered it. And placing it back there. When it’s in the gallery, it’s one thing. Or a museum—it’s great. But now whenever I’m able to get in places like that, I feel like people understand more than ever like, okay, this is what he’s discovering. He’s putting it back into that context.
And also it speaks to the public. There’s no ticket to buy. The curators are starting to catch on where it’s like, you know, at the Whitney, but you can see it through the window. And it’s actually at the bottom so you don’t actually have to buy a ticket to get in. You just view it straight from the window or you can go inside and look at it and then leave. Same thing with MoCA, same thing with the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
KENNY
And they’re doing that without your input?
PATRICK
No, I think they started to realize these things live in windows. The reason that I like that is because that’s actually the intention, right? But also I’m occupying space that those museums don’t even think about, you know what I mean? A lot of the museums think about public outreach, and they do programming to do that, but I like the fact that my work is in the window and it’s something you can see from the street.
KENNY
There’s no separation.
PATRICK
There’s no membership to buy, there’s no ticket to buy. They’re just like, what the fuck is that? That’s what I was actually feeling, like I was talking to the passerby. And it took a while and they’re in a context of a museum but they’re still speaking to the passerby, you know. I think that’s something that really makes me happy.
KENNY
I feel like that gets at what you were alluding to around success, of like—it’s a cliche of the artist of finding success and maintaining your perspective and what you want to say without diluting it. And trying to—even if it’s not you, but the people around you who want to get your work out to more people, that I think those little choices of how your work is seen is also a reminder to you about what your perspective is within the noise that comes at you when you are successful. When you’re in a place like the Whitney, when your work starts to get recognition almost beyond yourself.
PATRICK
Yeah. And it’s nice to actually point back to the past. And like, those installations were my speaking to the passerby in public. Like that’s who I was feeding it to when I was painting it so I feel like that’s not that really far-fetched.
It’s kind of like a continuation of investigating materials and things like that—language, color, all that stuff. But it’s kind of just like the same shit, you know? I don’t know, I just feel good about that. I don’t feel like I’m all over the place. I mean, some people will look at the body of work and go, oh wow, this and that. But it all connects. And it’s not conventional or a typical connection, but just looking and observing the work, you notice where it connects and the intersections.
KENNY
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like they are in the same universe.
But I think one thing you made me think of in just the idea of having a perspective—I’ve been thinking about this in the context of like, AI, and all this stuff around chatGPT, and you know, reproducing art and writing. To me, that’s not—I don’t deal in that fear because I think what artists bring and what they’ve always brought is a perspective. And I think if you are looking at art or writing or whatever it is as an aesthetic and as a product at the surface level, and something that you execute and not something that you have a perspective into, I think it’s easy to fall into that trap.
But one of the things I like to listen to is old recordings of artists talking to each other.
PATRICK
Oh yeah, me too.
KENNY
And I was listening to one James Baldwin / Nikki Giovanni chat that led me to James Baldwin’s talk, “The Moral Responsibility of the Artist.” And what he essentially says is that the artist is somebody who helps you to see reality again. And I like that definition of it because there are so many definitions of art and what an artist is, but I think especially in this time of tailored media consumption that I think is a large part of why we as a society feel so disconnected from each other, I feel like the point of an artist is always but especially at this time to kind of break through the chaos of everyday life and all the things that we sort of consume just by existing in this time, and to try to remind us of what actually matters in a time beyond our present.
PATRICK
Absolutely.
KENNY
And I see that so much in your work. I think art is a way of playing with time and space and I think especially in the last few years, the pandemic has made a lot of people rethink how they spend their time. And I think people who maybe worked in marketing or advertising have asked themselves a lot of questions. And I’ve seen those people pivot too.
PATRICK
Yeah, my partner is one. She was in advertising.
KENNY
Yeah, and I think through all of that time, what always made sense was art, you know? Beyond a pandemic, beyond our current circumstances of how we’re living, that’s always been a constant, I think. And I don’t know what the question is from that, but I think—
PATRICK
No, I feel you on that. I connect with you on that for sure.
And when you were talking about AI as a tool—it’s just a tool, right? And if you can’t really speak to anything that, really, people kind of like are connected to, then it just becomes like a photographer that has a really nice tool but a nice camera can only speak to so much.
And just thinking about my partner and just meaningful connections, right? My partner always had a passion for helping others and speaking to friends and family—we talk a lot about therapy, right? Counseling is something she has always been interested in, passionate about. And she was in marketing, advertising, and things like that. And she’s changing her career because through the pandemic, she understood that once you sort of slow down—just like art, you know, you start to see that maybe an artist has a point of view or kind of perspective into things. You start to realize that maybe through the noise and all the kind of chaos, that if I slow down and I breathe and I think about those things, it’s not something I want to be involved with. Whereas some people’s careers might be about making decent money and all that. It’s interesting to see.
KENNY
Yeah, it’s interesting especially towards the beginning of the pandemic of just how concentrated things were and how people were shifting—of what they were thinking about, what we’ll put up with in workplaces, or how you spend your time with what your work even is. But has that value of art in a more practical sense, that question of the value of art ever been present in your work?
That’s something that I’ve had to sort of learn through. Having immigrant parents and thinking about what work is for you and what work looked like for them and whether or not—you know, thinking about the value of an artist’s work in the day-to-day and how that can create distance from you and your family or you and the stories that you’re trying to tell through your work.
PATRICK
Yeah. I mean when I was growing up it was kind of about making work and trying to be an artist or having some type of passion. Cause I come from a working class family, right? So they obviously value—my dad saw the value because it’s something that his dad did. My grandfather, my uncles, all painted and drew.
So other than that, I mean, my mother didn’t really understand the value of it. My father kind of understood and he definitely pushed me to try because it was something that I was interested in. But I also understand just navigating once you’re trying to establish yourself as an artist, like, am I wasting my time trying to speak about certain narratives that don’t mean anything to anybody except me?
KENNY
Yeah.
PATRICK
In 2005, I graduated ArtCenter College of Design and I was making Pee Chee work in college, right? It wasn’t, I don’t know—see, that’s something I was talking about, like unpacking your past. I feel like I just worked through college, like three years of just going through it and just, I don’t know, making work and sticking it to the wall and seeing what felt good, you know? And I always came back to youth and authority, police brutality, police murder. You know, just things I was interested in and I didn’t know—
KENNY
It’s a perspective.
PATRICK
Right! It’s a perspective. And it was something that was happening to family members, it was happening—I saw it myself in different capacities. And it was something I felt like I wanted to make work about. I don’t know that I was like, oh this will be valuable because I’m trying to establish myself and like, bring another kind of perspective to fine art, you know what I mean? In the early 2000s, I don’t think that was my mentality. I just was and did not stop making that work. In 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005—I was doing that work.
KENNY
With the Pee Chee folders specifically?
PATRICK
Pee Chee folders, oil paintings of cops arresting, you know, family members, paintings of my brother, paintings of all my friends, Black and Brown—all this stuff.
KENNY
Yeah.
PATRICK
And why I made it I think was just something automatic that I needed to see physically. I don’t know what value I put on it. In college they wouldn’t know how to critique it. They would just kind of look at it and go—like the Pee Chee stuff, I had one professor tell me, “I don’t understand the connections you’re trying to make.” I think I had drawings—like ink wash drawings with acrylic, and also the Pee Chee work—of cops. And I was trying to connect P.E.—physical education—and the idea of getting arrested being a part of that, right?
KENNY
Right.
PATRICK
And it was all these paintings and stuff, right? And he just didn’t understand it. He was just like—well he didn’t say it this way but indirectly he just said pretty much— “This isn’t a reality.” Like, “We’ve already gotten past Rodney King, ‘the riots’ and all this stuff. And I think you should think about that.” And even then, I was just like, oh okay. He didn’t fool me. I was really just kind of, like, taken aback. Maybe I shouldn’t be so—like, where does this end? How am I gonna, like, live in this capitalist country and just kind of—I just continued to make it.
And it’s weird because I don’t know even what to tell you in those times of like, where did you see the value in it? Did you see value in making it? I just knew that it needed to come out. Like I needed to see it physically and see it take up space on a wall. I didn’t even think about it as like something that would be aiding protests or like something that would illustrate some type of narrative or something. I just wanted to make these scenes and this work that connected to something that I was interested in and that I saw happening. And, I don’t know, it’s kind of like I had no choice in it.
KENNY
Yeah.
PATRICK
Like I was just making stuff and it was just like a fever of what I needed to do beforehand to get to this other kind of plateau. That was just the beginning of the kind of simmering and it’s now something else.
But I don’t know, I think about those days a lot. And like why I continued to make that type of work because that work wasn’t getting any type of attention, it wasn’t getting any type of—you know, we would have a Scholarship Review. You would get funded. You know, private school—it was very expensive. So they would give you like a quarter of what you would be spending for your whole time there. I got very close one time. But I never got any type of scholarship or money through it.
And the stuff that was getting celebrated was stuff that looked like—I mean to be honest, it looked like the teacher’s work, right? Or it was just, like, analogous to the work that the teachers were making. They saw themselves in the work.
Whatever substandard kind of situation that might have been, even through that, the value of it was just kind of like me wanting to see it there and just knowing that I was making it and it was something that I needed to make and it was something that needed to take up space. It was something that, I don’t know, that wasn’t just decorative.
KENNY
Yeah. Yeah.
PATRICK
I think that was a lot of it too. Just wanting to disrupt the things that even in that college—you know, they probably hated seeing that shit.
KENNY
Yeah, of course. Especially at that time.
PATRICK
Yeah. Like, who the fuck is this guy, what the fuck is he doing? And I was very, you know, reserved. You know what I mean? I wasn’t like, yeah, fuck you guys, fuck everyone.
KENNY
You were putting it in the work.
PATRICK
I was just painting. I was drawing. I was doing my shit. I was sculpting. I was trying to disrupt the language the way I knew how to because that’s the language I speak—in a visual form. I’m not loud, I’m not all these things that you need to be in the—I just wanted to address it the strongest way that I can.
KENNY
I think to the point of how your work was being received versus classmates, that to me gets at that idea of kind of an AI world where like, there are many mechanisms that technology can use to reproduce what is already there. And that’s a lot of—that’s the majority of what’s happening at any time, I think. It’s human nature to be influenced and to reproduce something that’s working.
And to me, when we talk about an AI world, there’s no algorithm that will work against itself and work against what is working in order to try to say something. And I think that’s the difference between when we talk about machines and we talk about, I mean, artists, but I think just human beings and what we put into that work beyond the outcome.
PATRICK
Yeah, and even those technicians like you mentioned, almost like a hired technical hand that finishes some kind of idea based on already existing kind of finishes and executions, that’s only gonna push work to be even more different things that don’t exist right now. And I think that’s refreshing, you know?
KENNY
Isn’t that always the tension between technology and art-making or whatever?
PATRICK
Yeah. Yes.
KENNY
But to the Pee Chees, I think about that project kind of in two phases. Maybe there’s more, but I think of two major ones in what you were talking about when you started it, I guess, in 2005, 2006. And it was kind of the abstraction of what your professor didn’t get. Of playing with the idea of Americana—a 50s, 60s version of very white schools where young people grow into the best of themselves and school as a safe space or whatever—playing with just the general figure of the person on the folder running track to running from the police, kind of shifting the lens to what you were saying is the reality of youth and authority at this time versus what was being projected.
PATRICK
Exactly, yeah.
KENNY
That to me was phase one. And I guess phase two was when you picked it back up post-2012 when footage of Trayvon and Mike and Philando and all of these videos were coming out that that series became very specific. It became not about abstract lives or figures that you’re playing with the generalities of, it became less observational about youth and authority and more specific about memorializing these specific lives that were being, I think, lost in the kind of moral, intellectual conversation around police and police in schools, and just the larger conversation around police brutality and police murder in this country.
Was that a conscious choice in how you shifted or was it just something that just kind of came out of—
PATRICK
It’s something that—the way I work is really organic. I think that you’re definitely right about the first phase and the second phase. But speaking to the first phase, it was for me about illustrating in that first kind of Pee Chee folder design—which was really a silkscreen—was for me to see it and for me to kind of understand what I was trying to connect in terms of youth and authority, why I grew up with police in our schools. You know what I mean? I didn’t understand that. All that stuff, me trying to illustrate it maybe was even just like understanding that I wasn’t crazy and the way that we grew up was kind of a lot. Because it was that type of tension or that type of violence that could be at school and we’re normalizing it, you know? And me being an observer and artist being like, that shit is fucked up.
So it was then where I was unpacking it after high school. I was in college unpacking things and that was one of the things that I needed to see. And I left it at that. I probably did another one that was 2006, 2007. And obviously there was no footage or videos of these things I knew that were happening because I would see them also, right? We didn’t all have cell phones and we weren’t capturing it. The only thing was obviously the Uprising in ‘92 and video of the ‘91 beating of Rodney King by the LAPD.
So then they go, oh that’s an isolated incident. People just threw that out. All the folks in LA are crazy, they’re rioting, they’re burning shit up. But it was obviously something we knew about, right? It was something that was brewing. So that was kind of like—I didn’t have any reference material. I felt like I was just illustrating an idea that I wanted to see for myself.
And then 2014, 2015, all these images—high res, digital photography was now just kind of at your fingertips. They were uploading photos to the news, some of them footage. So you’re getting to see these things happen. The person that it happened to, their family. And knowing that this has been happening so this is gonna happen again. It just started snowballing. And everything got lost in the shuffle. And the narratives were just kind of coming out, and it was just so much to digest. I was wanting to slow all that down with painting. And painting those things into importance. That was kind of the idea. That was the mindset when I picked it back up.
KENNY
Yeah.
PATRICK
Obviously the first part of it was kind of exploratory. Kind of wanting to see what I was dealing with, what my ideas were about it. And then it, like you said, became really specific.
KENNY
But I think that makes sense just looking at the Pee Chee folder as what it was. It was supposed to be generic, you know? It was supposed to be, this was a utopia of whatever ideal—
PATRICK
Yeah! And that’s what we thought about in high school when we saw them. Like, whoa this is not my high school. And, you know, without being able to articulate it at the time, it was something that was like a version that felt to me like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or even before that, right? Like in the 70s, something that felt like an American high school narrative. But looking at that idea and knowing that that wasn’t reality. It was something that we knew in high school and that’s why we drew on them.
KENNY
Yeah, yeah. I think hearing you talk through that, the Pee Chee series—all of your work, but I think especially the Pee Chee series, gets at that idea that I was talking about with discovery in your work. That I feel like there is this aspect to youthfulness in your work—not of inexperience or immaturity but in the sense of being open to experimentation. And in that experimentation, making that part of your process to discover what is there. The Pee Chee series, to me, speaks a lot to that.
It feels like that desire to kind of reach youth and to speak to youth directly in a way that I wonder, is it tied to you at that time and how you were thinking about the world in high school and starting to think about these ideas?
PATRICK
I think so. I never really thought about it consciously. Like am I trying to reach the youth in this? Or was I just trying to express what my experience was or what I felt like was truth?
But when I’m going through it and involved with it and making this stuff, I started thinking that it could be something that was a bridge to youth. And it was something always interesting to me. Like when I talk about art, I was lucky to be at a school or in my district where we had, you know, in our elementary school, middle school—we’d get bussed to a museum or something. And I felt that connection of being young and experiencing art and knowing that it’s important when you step in but not feeling like it was of our time, right? It wasn’t anything that really, kind of, we could relate to.
Once that kind of happens I think that youth just kind of become like, oh okay that’s cool. It’s just something that becomes kind of like, okay, I experienced it, cool. I guess in that sense I thought about that, I thought about what about my brother, what about all my friends, all these things—I want to speak to them, I want to speak to their experience, my experience. So when—I don’t know, not that I was thinking I would ever be in a museum even, but if I were to make work, it would speak to them and they could see that and they would feel like they were being represented, I guess. Or it wasn’t bullshit. That it was real and spoke of truth.
And the Pee Chee work, I think that the connection was always there because of the folders. But I don’t think the outreach was something conscious at the beginning. It was just how it evolved. And the people that I was painting the memorials of on panels were kids—17, 18, just wrapping high school, or they were in high school, about to start high school. So there was a direct connection and it had to start growing legs and kind of infiltrating those spaces because, again, it’s pretty hard not to see how these people could have been them or could have been their friends or their family.
KENNY
Yeah. I think working in arts education, giving that kind of—this word gets used a lot now, but representation—and I don’t even mean racial representation but just representation of a reality is so important when working with youth and especially with high school students where you’re at an age where so many adults are not telling you the truth.
PATRICK
Yes.
KENNY
And I think especially with something like the Pee Chee Project in LAUSD, regardless of how difficult things were in schools in 2020, I think the value of arts education and people who work in that very rigid system and try to find ways to bring beauty in, is that—
I guess to back up, the problem with schools now is that so much of how we want students to learn within them is so disconnected to the world outside of it. And we haven’t found a way to reconcile that for so many reasons, and the lack of funding, and the lack of resources into updating that gap. It’s like the Pee Chee folders where we talk about schools and how to address them in this abstract ideal when the reality of what they face looks completely different.
But I think I was so absorbed in that work even though there were so many difficulties to it because it made sense when you saw it in person. Of seeing young people feel respected enough to deal with the truth and to hold the truth in themselves. Whether that’s contained in the conversation of whatever work you’re putting in front of them or the idea of learning built around it that brought truth to spaces that shifted how students engaged—that version of school made sense.
I think to your point, so much of that idea of art gets sort of self-selected out of young people, at least I think when we were growing up. Of what an artist is and what art deals with. But I think the value is in finding ways to show them realities that don’t show up in textbooks and won’t show up in textbooks for however long.
PATRICK
And are at this point getting extracted from textbooks, right? Like information and histories.
KENNY
Totally.
PATRICK
But yeah, you were talking about conversations and speaking the truth, youth, things like that, right?
KENNY
Yeah.
PATRICK
It wasn’t a conscious decision to try to do that in the beginning. But when I found educators wanting to take them as the folders, or just the images as tools to speak to the youth—and in some cases they were children—to help illustrate what was happening or what they might be hearing about, it’s one of those things where it comes back to language and visual language is the way I speak. And I feel that the work that I make is a conversation, right? I can speak to beauty, which is valid. It can speak to youth and authority, police murder. I can speak to the past, the present, all these things that we’re talking about.
And when I’m talking to youth, I don’t want to lie to them. I don’t want to just bullshit them. A textbook might. A textbook might do that. An educator might do that or just kind of like—when I have that attention, I want to give them that respect, right? Because they know. They deserve respect. And I want to speak truth to them.
So that’s where it ended up. Like, oh okay, got it. That’s something that these educators are using? Okay. It’s something that I felt responsible to do, just to be truthful.
KENNY
Yeah, and I think sometimes when we think about youth or working with young people, it’s not even that idea of the act of teaching. It’s the act of thinking about young people just as the kind of building blocks of human beings and how when we’re at an age where we’re starting to think about the world and starting to make meaning of it for ourselves—to give them all the tools to see the truth and to try to make meaning out of that.
I think as I’ve sort of moved away from kind of 9 to 5 arts education, that is a big part of, like, having to negotiate what you’re letting go of and what you’re moving into and how you reconcile those things. And ultimately, I think it’s always about trying to find the truth in the world and try to present that whether that’s to students or in your work itself.
I just, I don’t know, I think about how working with young people, how it forces you to think about how you’re presenting the world and the truth about it to them.
PATRICK
Yeah, yeah. And that becomes very personal in some cases, right? Your personal kind of experience and hopefully connecting it, even if they’re negative. Those types of experiences can really—
You know, there’s a certain language that gets used in schools, right? But when you start to slow down and really respect them and start talking to them, they should be respected and talked to honestly.
KENNY
Totally. And there’s a line you’re walking in those spaces too of like, creating these spaces in classrooms and pushing up against sometimes teachers who that makes nervous. And seeing just how much of schooling in this country in general is on eggshells if not broken. And so much of it is about a lot of what’s in the Pee Chee work—of surveillance and authority and control from a structural level.
PATRICK
Yeah. Yeah. Even just thinking when you said that, just of my years in high school, even middle school—like it was broken and it was a failure. Even my brother who was in the system, he tells me all the time—it started with school. It started with a broken school.
You know, it’s one of those things where even now with my partner, we talk about middle school a lot. And just kind of how fragile that could have been, and how it was for us and it could be right now for our child, or children transitioning into that type of middle school. And how we navigated and how we got through that. My partner thinks it’s like the worst time for mental health. But I don’t know, it was just something we definitely got through. It was just so much of a failure. Sometimes I don’t even know how I’m a working artist right now, you know?
KENNY
Yeah. Yeah.
PATRICK
Because it was that much of a joke.
KENNY
It’s bad and I think we don’t really know how bad yet. When you lose the thread on your public institutions, the rest goes too.
We kind of touched on this earlier with the idea of found beauty in your work. And I think the Pee Chee series, like I was saying, felt like it started off more observational and then it became more almost record-keeping.
PATRICK
Mm hmm.
KENNY
And of kind of cropping the frame to say what is important to remember. And be memorialized. And I think that leads me into thinking about your work in the Cake series, and also how that’s tied to the Landscape series. Because I see them all connected. They’re all living in the same world, right?
PATRICK
Right.
KENNY
You have neon on your landscapes. And I think the idea of the Cake series is that they live within these landscapes and these stores that you’re kind of depicting, right?
PATRICK
Yeah. They house those cakes. These pastry shops, yeah.
KENNY
I was really interested in what you’re trying to get at in the Cake series because it does feel so rooted in—I mean all of it feels rooted in neighborhood and thinking about your immediate surroundings, but I think the Cake series takes a deeper step into the landscape work.
You know, you think about someone buying that sheet cake for a family celebration and you picture their backyard or whatever it is. Could you talk a little bit about the way that you play with, again, the people that we memorialize and the ways that we visualize even in the medium of showing them on a sheet cake versus like a more formal, standard portrait?
PATRICK
Yeah. The Cake portraits are kind of a celebratory portrait kind of idea. Like memorials are very heavy, right? The gravity of them is just kind of like this icky feeling that you get from it.
I feel like the Cake series was something I started and I never really stopped. I probably started in 2013 with that portrait series. But the idea was: everything I do is just to kind of flip traditional European easel painting, right? Like the landscapes aren’t the way you’re supposed to paint a landscape. Or thinking about foreground, backgrounds—this is not how you’re supposed to establish that, you know what I mean? Materials physical and painted on. And the Cake series is just like an inversion of a serious kind of formal painting that mimics things that you might see in federal buildings or the White House or whatever, right—with the Caravaggio-esque kind of finish, dark background, serious kind of pose.
These are celebratory portraits that are an inverse of that black background. It’s all this white, neon green, pink, that’s all kind of connected to a community aesthetic that feels festive. That feels, you know, connected to a happy time. Everyone has a birthday so I wanted to celebrate people in history that felt discounted in America.
KENNY
Yeah.
PATRICK
And also in that, when I come across portraits or photos of these people, I’m also thinking about renewing a portrait for them almost. Like it’s the guy at the renewal at the DMV or something. Like colorizing photos in that way or presenting it in a new context or just a new way. And it makes them something to look at. And so that’s the idea behind slowing down and celebrating these people.
But also in a technical sense it’s like what I can add to the conversation in painting, right? Those things are based off of traditional European easel portraits, oil portraits. But they’re also about how I apply paint and trying to find a way just like the landscapes to apply things differently to that surface. So taking frosters and putting paint in them and frosting things. And airbrushing. Doing all the things you’re not supposed to do in a portrait. And speak a different way to a tradition of portrait-making.
KENNY
Right. That it goes into not just the product it sits on but the process of how you’re making that portrait.
PATRICK
Yeah. Yeah.
KENNY
I think the Cake series is really interesting to me because it’s not even about whether it’s Frederick Douglass or Cesar Chavez or Angela Davis or whoever is memorialized on the cake itself. To me that series and that work isn’t even about that person, it’s about what it hints at, what it gestures at where that cake is being taken, where it will live.
PATRICK
That’s interesting. Yeah.
KENNY
To me it feels so much like a backyard family celebration because of what a sheet cake plays with.
PATRICK
Plus, you guys should know about this—
KENNY
Totally. The connection between the person that is memorialized with the people that are eating around it and the similar themes of what is worthy of the people that we look up to, what is worthy of memorialization.
PATRICK
It’s almost like it’s my birthday, but let’s celebrate and learn about Frederick Douglass. Boom.
KENNY
I think yes it’s that but it ties it and, not elevates, but brings a perspective that ties everyday people and these backyard celebrations to these kinds of historical figures that I think in hindsight we end up revering but did not at the time. I think that’s all in that conversation of—
PATRICK
Yeah.
KENNY
—archive and of contemporary archive. What is worthy of a life worth documenting?
PATRICK
Right. And even serious figures like Frederick Douglass, of putting them in the context or just kind of like painting them in a way that people can digest who they might be or be that spark to look into that person and digest, you know, who was he? And he worked towards abolition. And oh, I didn’t know that. But because oh my god, it can hang in a museum, it’s in a gallery, it’s important. I don’t know, people just kind of give it value or they put it on the wall. And it’s like, okay well who is that? Why did they paint this person? And they might not even know who they might be, like Chief Joseph or whatever.
KENNY
Yeah, and I think cake, again, is interesting because of what food in general makes us think about. And I think I’ve been really interested as I’ve kind of moved into the food world in using food as a way—as a tool of understanding the city, really.
PATRICK
Uh huh.
KENNY
Of doing the same thing as I was doing, I think, as an arts educator in thinking about history and the stories we tell, and I think the idea of archive and how there is no comprehensive record of immigrant and communities of color because they were not deemed historical or important enough to archive. And I think of food as an archive in the way that so many of these communities kept their culture alive for each other and how so much of that storytelling and knowledge is buried in the ways that we brought pieces of home when we came from another place in the foods that we made and took care of each other with once we were here.
PATRICK
Interesting.
KENNY
And I think there’s so much in the kind of anthropological way of looking at food as a way of understanding what it stands in for in place of language, especially when so many immigrants have a loss of language when they come to this country, even within their own families and their own kids.
PATRICK
Yeah. I mean I definitely connect with you on that for sure. Things are kind of coming to mind and I think about the records and representation, all of it. We’re not being recorded in a sense but recording it for themselves in food and things like that. I’m just trying to maybe do the same thing or something like that with the work that I make. I think the parallels are definitely there.
I don’t know, LA is like that, right? It’s so—those communities I brought up earlier, I’m just trying to represent all of that. The things that I can download, the things that I’m part of. I want to almost record not using photojournalism type of tactics but more just in some ways that might be more subtle than kind of straightforward. And so those subtleties of traveling through the city, like Alhambra to El Monte to Monterey Park—all those communities, all those friends that I know from different pockets, and understanding that stew and wanting to see a lot of it come together like my mother and my father did.
KENNY
Yeah. And I think so much of that in your work comes through. I wonder if it even is conscious because so much of your background, I think, feels like Los Angeles. Your dad’s side has Indigenous, Mexican heritage. And your mom’s side from the Philippines. Even that feels so Los Angeles in a lot of things that I’m thinking of in the history of even labor in this country and the Filipino and Mexican communities and the history around that.
I don’t know that that’s even a question, but I think when I look at your work and I look at all the different forms of it, it does feel so much like an archive of Los Angeles right now. You know?
PATRICK
Yeah. It’s interesting you say that because, like, I guess growing up I felt there was definitely ambiguity there, right? And a lot of this is me figuring all this stuff out and where I kind of, you know, am working things out for myself. Cause along with the stew of things, people that are out there that are established say, I’m this, I’m that. And there’s a lot of mixtures too but I think all of this is definitely a representation of me establishing my own kind of history. You know what I mean?
KENNY
Absolutely.
PATRICK
The present day as history, as artifact. All of it. I think about that often, too, when I’m making it. It’s like you’re navigating all these—art is actions and intuition is involved but it’s all kind of intimate and kind of personal.
KENNY
And I think, again with the Cake series—it’s these historical figures but it feels so personal because of the form and the context that it’s in.
PATRICK
Yeah.
KENNY
And I think it’s interesting to explore your work to think about what you can kind of preserve in a time in a city that is always changing—
PATRICK
Yes.
KENNY
That’s always being built up and torn down and what it looks like to try and stay in those moments in between to think about what it felt like to exist in a time when those things were going up and going down all the time as a result of these larger political issues of gentrification and all these other things that I think, like you said, maybe you’re not loud about in your work but it’s all there in just the kind of lens of what you’re observing.
PATRICK
The feeling even, too. I think about that because I have friends that are photographers and they capture that. They capture places that have been, you know—they’re not there anymore. But I guess my contribution to that would be the feeling of the time that we’re living in. It’s the only thing I can express in the work that I make.
So I don’t feel that I need to document a specific person at a place that’s faded. It’s more about just the feeling of and representing that kind of energy and that kind of aesthetic even in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with fashion, anything that’s dated, or the kind of building—you know, it looks like it’s from the 50s and then torn down in 2000. I try to find ways to navigate those things but still kind of in my own way be coming to an artifact that’s kind of a separate thing. But also represent some of those visual cues of change.
KENNY
Yeah, and I think that idea of archive and art as a medium to plug into that I think lasts beyond our current time and our time here that is in dialogue with that.
Whenever I think about, you know, that conversation that I’ve moved past at this point in my life of the sort of value of being an artist or thinking about art, it’s like—thinking about the Japanese rock gardens in the incarceration camps and how people who are in the depths of hate and war and all the things that can corrupt humanity, that they still had the urge to create art. And to use whatever they had that I think has to speak to something larger in us as human beings than the circumstances of our time.
PATRICK
Like it has to happen, right? It’s like we need it.
KENNY
Yeah!
PATRICK
It’s like self-preservation. It needs to be, it needs to exist, I need to see it. It needs to happen for me, you know what I mean, to even be here. Because it’s not about me being established as an artist or whatever. It’s just me wanting to see it. And it needs to happen, it needs to occupy space and hopefully people can identify with it. That’s what it is.
KENNY
In thinking about how your Pee Chee project shifted in those two phases we were talking about, how it got much more specific from the abstract. How has becoming a dad, having a child—has it shifted any of your work to feel more specific in a way? Like I said, a lot of your work is in observation and archive. Has any of your thinking about these ideas of preserving history and family and identity and all of these things that go into your work shifted at all with the urgency of seeing a child in front of you?
PATRICK
Yeah, you’re talking about like the lens that I’m kind of creating. Like has it shifted when I’ve made work, has it informed the work in a different way?
KENNY
Yeah. And I can’t speak to having a child so I don’t know yet, but in the way that we think about our work and our legacy and what we’re trying to say through our work in a way that feels kind of abstract before we have children ourselves. I guess I wonder if that makes it feel more tangible.
PATRICK
I don’t know. I mean, it’s different modes that I’m in. The landscapes, like I’m still in this mode where it just becomes like a fever of creating. I’m in fluid mode and I’m making marks. But when I slow down and I do the Pee Chee stuff, I think about things, right? I think about my daughter like in this piece up here about Uvalde. I thought about—
KENNY
I’ve never seen that one.
PATRICK
Yeah, I just made it.
So thinking about—like, visiting daycare with her, getting her into this kind of system, right, where I’m thinking about these situations. Not that—I haven’t thought about that because it’s terrible to happen. But the decorative kind of framework that there is—like the corkboard, right, that you see in schools to put bulletins on. I was thinking about her when I was making it. Because I had made the painting. And I said, this isn’t where it needs to live. It needs to be directly on some type of surface that would be in school. Because we started touring daycares and schools for her.
Not that they were absent from my mind because that was my experience too and stuff that would still be in schools when I was going to school. So connecting my experiences and also her experience now, I was like, oh this is where it belongs. And I painted it directly on the corkboard. And I painted this kind of motif where these kind of decorative flowers would be like cut-outs next to the painting. It’s all painted but stuff like that is new because the experience and the connections are just there.
KENNY
And you see your own experiences in a different way when you’re seeing it outside of yourself.
PATRICK
Yeah, my experience, the tragedy in Uvalde, and then also just my child being in the situations that I was in that she might be in.
But yeah, I think specifically when I slow down and I start to think about things, I think about her. It’s just a different mode like having a conversation and different kinds of temperaments. They’re all kind of analogous but there’s different speeds. But when I start to slow down and do think about ideas that they kind of bring in, that specifically is what I’m thinking about.
Whereas a lot of the paintings that I did before about the Pee Chee folders, a lot of it was about action. It was always hitting and shooting and running and with this piece I wanted to highlight the inactivity. The type of just sitting in place and them being not activated when they were supposed to be. So that was something I wanted to highlight. Not hitting people—I mean, I have done that. But those are expressing something else, and I wanted this scene to be very boring because it was, like, still. And it shouldn’t be.
When they’re not even—a lot of these shootings and beatings happen when there’s minor infractions or they’re stopping citizens getting pulled over for a broken tail light. Those interactions and what prompts them are not instigated, right? They’re not stopping people, like, cool give me the ticket, I’m outta here. It doesn’t stop there. It escalates.
When there’s a situation that was instigating their participation, it just was this. It was still. They were plotting and regrouping and children were getting killed. So it was something I’ve thought about. Obviously having a child it’s something that you think about in more detail.
KENNY
Of course. It’s really interesting to think about how the Pee Chee series continues to evolve, that even within the same form, it really is saying something very different. What you were saying about the action to, now that so much time has passed, the point of view is sort of the inaction that allows this to continue.
And all that I think is interesting from an artist’s point of view because in the conversation around success where you become known for something, and having to find your own way through having that work evolve without letting the success of it cloud that, even though it will always intermingle. But I think it’s finding new ways to engage yourself in that work that keeps you nimble.
PATRICK
Yeah. And it’s something that making the work, I want to—not that I’m forcing things to evolve but they just are like that setting. And, you know, thinking about organizations that popped up during all this kind of injustice, like Blue Lives Matter. This is kind of a response to that, meaning that inaction and saying what we do matters more than children’s lives.
All this stuff that comes up pushes us to look. And I was wanting to respond in kind of an official way. And then even knowing the fact that, at least for me, these paintings in a gallery context are not flying off the walls. You know what I mean? I’m making this work because I want to make it. And I don’t think—it might sell, but it probably won’t.
And me wanting to push it for my own purpose doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be good. And I want it to be. And it’s something that I take my time with because it’s a responsibility and something I feel connected to. I know that I can speak truth to that situation. It’s nothing that I’m making up. These are all images that you can look up yourself. But, you know, composed in a new way.
KENNY
Yeah, and I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier of being in that ArtCenter class and your work being about something that’s bigger than just right now. And knowing in your work that even if this isn’t what’s selling right now, I think part of that is being an artist whose lens is tied so much to observing the present. And I think a lot of times in the art world, people put value on things once they’ve been able to process it. And maybe not always in the contemporary. But I think a lot of that has less to do with the work and more with the business around the work.
PATRICK
Yeah. And I think when I’m looking at this now, and I’m making the work, that body of work is valuable—that I fought all those kinds of hurdles and not thinking about a market and all these things that I’m trying to occupy. Like thinking about all this stuff, it’s great that I can do work like that and—in a monetary sense, it’s a privilege to make work and not worry about paying my rent. But also just to take time and do work like that and knowing that it might not sell—I don’t know, it just feeds, it nourishes.
KENNY
And isn’t that experimentation kind of what the flipside of having successful series allows you the space to sort of—
PATRICK
Yeah, yeah that’s true. But it’s fun to do stuff that’s just valuable to me to do.
KENNY
Yeah, it’s a balance between making art and having to survive in the world.
PATRICK
Yeah.
KENNY
One last question. And it’s a quote from your essay in the UCLA Chicano Studies journal, Atzlán.
Also, I saw the Artbound episode. It was beautiful. How’d you feel about it?
PATRICK
It was interesting. They said all these artists were going to be involved that were friends and acquaintances so I was excited about that. But also to speak about the nuance and subtlety to my upbringing and try to get that across. And the interview with my brother kind of spoke to that. Like, I’m getting to say myself to PBS that, hey, you read the last name but my mother was Filipino. And this is my brother. It’s nuanced. My experience is a little different. And any situation that I have an opportunity to speak to that, I like doing it. I thought they did a good job with it.
KENNY
I thought the stuff with your brother was beautiful.
PATRICK
Yeah, and he doesn’t really—he’s been there the whole time, right? In the background, helping me. So to slow down and kind of give him some time to kind of think about it and speak to it was good.
KENNY
Yeah.
But from the essay, the part I pulled out was kind of the last chunk of it:
“I come from a multiplicity of intertwined groups. Based on DNA testing, my father’s side comes from Mexico, from areas in the states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Zacatecas. On my mother’s side, my grandparents Francisco and Ursula Deriada come from Tacloban, which is a small city in the Philippines. Having such a diverse heritage really complicated how I identified or fit in.
The fact is, sometimes it is hard for me to understand my experience. I feel stripped from some of my history, and I think that ‘lost and found’ idea is one hundred percent American. I do not feel authentic to anywhere. Maybe I am creating my own story because of that lost history. I envision the art I make as artifacts that will speak to future generations while preserving the beautiful complexity of my roots. I have always had an interest in mirroring the time we are living, and I hope to convey these complex layers of identity.
I want the viewer’s experience to feel like we are taking a drive through the San Gabriel Valley, El Monte to Monterey Park, East LA to Huntington Park, Montebello to Inglewood. These are the rich diverse pockets of the city whose people I seek to represent in my landscapes. My friends and family live in these cities, and I want to speak to them in neon.
I work from ancestral memory, imagination, photos, and the stories that expand to capture the multiplicity of our intertwined roots. I take materials from the city of Los Angeles to compose my landscapes. I currently continue to unearth and investigate this evolving city that I call my home.”
I love that because I think it encapsulates so much of your work. But I guess what I was thinking about was in that idea of just wanting to communicate with your friends and family through neon, of this idea of time and thinking about, again, discovery in your process. How much of that reflection and of your work is you as that kid who’s just discovering, you know, whether that’s graffiti art or playing with pen and paper at a time and at an age when you were starting to make sense of all of these things that maybe you felt unable to categorize in your brain growing up? How much of that art-making now is in coming back to it and that kind of lost and found feeling of coming back to the city you grew up in through your work and rediscovering it in yourself?
PATRICK
Yeah, yeah I am wanting to be a teenager, right? Like I was just discovering that you can make paintings—this is how we were articulating back then—out of hardware paint or things that you weren’t supposed to make paintings with. I feel like that’s so valuable. Like I think about that often. We’re 11, 12 years old right? Seeing my brother do graffiti and then going to spray can art. I mean, not like I was articulating it back then, but manipulating something that wasn’t meant to be artwork on the sides or panels of trains or walls.
So I teleport there but I also live in the present, right? And I also try to have that version of myself now where I’m discovering things and I have that confidence where I can say, that’s art, that’s valid, I’m gonna put that shit in there. And I’m gonna compose all of it.
It’s a hundred percent—I mean, it’s weird because I started collecting shirts that I would wear when I was 11, 12 years old in that graffiti phase. Some of them have the original shirts. You know, someone will have them for sale. Because I am trying to tap into that and remember that version of myself. Even the 6-year-old version of me and discovering art materials—tissue paper, glue, crayon, pencils, all that stuff.
Having those versions of myself and the new version of myself all kind of interconnected making the work. It’s something that I try to live in or just try to—like I think that I’m just able to tap back into it because, I don’t know, like when I want to transport back to driving around with my mother, I listen to the music that she would play in the car. And It’s a weird thing. And then obviously living in, you know, being present today, I’m just observing and being open to the land providing what is next. All I need to do is pay attention. Go outside and just like crops or like anything that you grow, the land is gonna provide something for me.
People, like friends will be like, what you’re doing is crazy because it’s like, that’s a hard thing to do. It’s like, you pay attention, and you figure out the vocabulary that you’re trying to speak with. It’s almost like you have too much. You have to start editing that stuff down. But also respecting and thinking about the past and how you operated is totally valid. And it’s something that I feel so lucky to do because a lot of people don’t have that connection to themselves. They go to school and they are taught that this is very important or they go to their graduate studies and they feel like something gets overshadowed and it becomes very restrictive and forget the original goal and why you wanted to start. And that validity of just making art like it had to happen. It just had to happen.
I mean, I operate with those different kind of ideas in my mind. They transport back and forth, in the middle, and then back.
KENNY
Yeah, you can feel it. There’s a movement to things that I think especially in a city like Los Angeles—it captures the idea of a city that’s always moving and I think the neons especially speak to that. Of a city that’s always on and hustling and trying to survive in a kind of hyper-capitalistic time that we exist in. But I think so much of your work is about framing what we look at and just the idea of looking at what’s in front of you. And paying attention.
That I think goes all the way back to what we were talking about in the point of an artist in cutting through all of the neon that’s facing us every day and looking at what actually matters and what is a product of our time and what is actually the matter of being a person, being alive I guess.
PATRICK
Yeah. Yeah. It’s also just like thinking about existing in those spaces, right? Past, present, and future. Even everything that I’m making in terms of like ideas and concepts, it’s like they’re never really discarded. They’re just kind of put away and kind of filed.
Some of the works that I’m working on—the Pee Chee folders, the Mean Streaks that I use on the tile—that’s all from my teenage years, you know what I mean? The spray paint. I’m never discarding anything really from my toolbox. I’m just putting it away. And I’m so glad and so privileged to be able to do that, I think. Because even just marking with those materials that I used to do things with when I was 12 and 13, that’s like—
KENNY
It’s a portal.
PATRICK
It’s a big connection. Yeah, it’s a total portal. And I can get lost in that and it feels good.
KENNY
That makes so much sense in just the materials that you use and why that sense of discovery, that sense of youthfulness and curiosity is present because you’re using the actual or similar tools you were using when you were a teenager. I think that kind of physical muscle memory almost comes out as hologram in your work.
PATRICK
Yeah. Yeah. It shows up.