Patti Oleon: Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Patti Oleon titled Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday. The exhibition features eight oil paintings created over the course of the last year that depict windows and doorways in interior spaces, particularly entryways and hallways in elegant older homes and buildings. In these works, chiaroscuro techniques are employed to create dreamlike images that shift reflections of light and our perception of time and place. This will be Patti Oleon’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Oleon’s process, rooted in photography, produces works that question our concept of reality. While each painting is created from an image of an actual location, the artist relies on the cinematic effect of the camera to create scenes that reveal the light cast through doorways, curtains, and glass, often reflected in geometric patterns rendered in subdued shades of golden yellow, pale green and light blue set against dark shadowed walls. The camera’s function in capturing light abstracts and darkens most of the signifiers in each room. The particular location of each piece recedes in significance, and the works begin to function as if the artist is building a memory or forming a dream. Each room that Oleon depicts is a place that she has been, but the works also act as a space that she could be going. The mind is left to fill in the blanks—the color of the walls, the sound of footsteps on the hard floors, the feel of cool air from a drafty window…

The images in this series were originally shot on Kodachrome film. Oleon’s choice of film, with its mass popularity in the 1960s and 70s capturing every holiday, wedding, graduation, and family event, provides both an exquisite image from which to paint, but also an indicator of her works as a repository of memories, where past and present merge in a dreamscape of half-remembered visions captured by a now discontinued medium. Patti Oleon's paintings exude a palpable nostalgia for bygone days, yet with her evocative use of light she reveals an ephemeral quality, contemplating the transient nature of perception and the elusive essence of truth.