Patricia Ayres: Articles of the Estranged

Articles of the Estranged is a compendium of counterpoints, a proposal of movement fixed and transposed onto cross-stitched aberrations. The exhibition’s distinctive elements of suspension and tension, along with intermingling infrastructure and interiors, represent a point of departure. These sculptures function as facsimiles from a purgatorial pendulum, a psychological embodiment of a constricted condition. In this questioning of the concordat¹, these personified parturitions ask where the individual fits into the equation of church and state.

Incrementally, the seepage of architecture has become more pronounced in Ayres’ work. It is ever-present in the appropriation of the 14th-century chapel of St. Nicholas, built on a bridge binding papal territories and lands of the French monarchy. Her sutured saint’s scale segues beyond the parameters of a body or bust and, in doing so, presents a paradoxical purview, situating the sculpture as a container of inquiry. One can fathom that all the other articles in this exhibition were once inhabitants of the behemoth—this issues a dual proposition concerning the motifs of constraint and expulsion as well as salvation and condemnation. The articles dispersed in the gallery become a catalog of a catastrophe, revealing a comparison between Ayres’ saint and Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Angelus Novus.²

Aborted from their host, propagating appendages take on unworldly characteristics while maintaining an uncannily familiar objecthood. Defying gravity’s convictions, crucifix-like cadavers seem to be propelling themselves away from the wall. Burls on the busts and tops of totems insinuate a sort of forced replication. Segmented stains sit as signifiers of societal segregation. When intimately examined, these formidable figurations reveal the fragility of their fabrication. Flaws are filled with gunk, cleansed with wine, stitched shut, and painted over, then pushed forward.

This precession of production is eerily emblematic of processing seen within the prison system. Ayres’ interest in the conditioning of the corporally confined is a plea for introspection. Can a sinner be saved? Can the saved be sinners? Is there sanctimony for those who sentence others to social death?³ Sewn shut, these subjugated semblances are hooked in suspended judgment, tethered taut with institutional hardware, and stand silent as markers of our Absurdist⁴ reality.

—Tyler Christopher Brown

1. Concordat refers to an agreement or treaty between the Vatican and a secular government relating to matters of mutual interest.
2. The Angelus Novus is drawn from Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay “On the Concept of History” which outlines his theory of the “angel of history,” a melancholy view of the historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair.
3. Social death refers to the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society. It refers to when someone is treated as if they are dead or non-existent.
4. Albert Camus was a French philosopher and political activist, who outlined the absurd as the futility of a search for meaning in an incomprehensible universe, devoid of God, or meaning. Absurdism arises out of the tension between our desire for order, meaning and happiness and, on the other hand, the indifferent natural universe’s refusal to provide that.