“Unrequited Remnants”
06 November, 2024--28 February, 2025
Project Space, TANK Shanghai, Shanghai, China
TANK Shanghai is pleased to announce the presentation of artist Patricia Ayres’ solo exhibition, “Unrequited Remnants”. The exhibition opens on November 6, 2024, and continues through February 28, 2025.
Unrequited Remnants delves into the conventions and restrictions that define our contemporary society. The sculptural assemblages featured in the exhibition function as “matter out of place,” a concept Mary Douglas investigates in reference to dirt in her seminal work Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Enmeshed in gunk and residues, the forms' orientations vary with unorthodox postures, some dangling while others seemingly protruding from the earth. These unfixed allusions echo the instability of categorization akin to Judith Butler’s analysis in Bodies That Matter. Butler argues that the abjection of certain bodies and identities is crucial to the formation of normative subjectivity. Abjection, in this context, refers to the process by which what is deemed undesirable, unclean, or unnatural is cast out of the realm of the recognizable human, thus reinforcing the boundaries of what is considered “normal” or acceptable. Ayres’ anomalous abominations articulate the inaudible convictions.
19-1-2-9-14-1
2023
Elastic, paint, ink, dye, anointing oil, sacramental wine, US Military parachute hardware, padding, wood
215.9 × 109.2 × 109.2 cm
About the artist
Patricia Ayres is an artist from New York. Ayres attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, Bachelor of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, and an A.A.S degree in Fashion Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her works are based on the structure of social constraints. The sculptures, thanks in part to her fashion education, were shaped according to Ayres’ creative process, elaborating on her conceptual origins.
Text courtesy Tyler Christopher Brown.