I'd known Ippy Patterson for a while and had admired her intricate pen and ink work. We have one of her Electricy of Plants Series pieces in our collection. I also adored her but it never really occurred to me that I might show her work here at Cassilhaus. I seem to have this obsession with photography:) One day a year or so ago I got the photograph below in the signature of one of her emails.
I loved it and told her I didn't know she did photography. She told me she didn't really and that she had taken this with her cell phone. I asked if I could see more of her photos the next time we got together and she was pretty dismissive of the idea. But pretty regularly I started to get little cell phone image missives in my inbox and if I liked them I would reply for her to "put it on the pile."
Pretty soon I wanted to see "the pile" in person and Ellen and I scheduled a studio visit at Ippy's place. Bodies of work just kept coming out of boxes and we loved every one of them and there was an amazing range. She was even working on a video piece for the first time. I told her that we wanted to do a big career retrospective show but would do it if and only if she agreed to exhibit her photographs for the first time.
Ignorance really is a huge advantage when taking on big projects and I'd definitely never done anything this ambitious. Fortunately our intern Rachel and Ippy and her husband Neil were with me every step of the way. The show turned out to have 93 pieces across 8 media throughout the entire house! But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
We started in December of last year to select and sequence the photographs. We spent a good bit of time talking about scale, framing, pairings etc. and after quite a few iterations we settled on 13 images and found some interesting dialog between the pieces.
One of my favorites is a self portrait called Maj-jong Self Portrait.
Ellen and I had been to Ippy and Neil's for dinner a few times over the years and we loved this amazing large abstract drawing she had done directly on her dining room wall. She called it a hair drawing.
I asked her if she would do one on the main wall going into the gallery and she was totally game. She showed up in early May with a drop cloth, a boom box, and a box of art supplies and made a magical installation which set the bar for the entire exhibition.
Another body of work that Ippy had not exhibited before was her ongoing series called the Boogeyman Memoirs. It is (as of this writing) a series of 28 mostly dark and forboding rememberances of her childhood growing up in the Atacama Desert in Chile-a very stark contrast to her luscious botanical drawings and other work. She plans ultimately to pair these technically brilliant drawings with narrative text for a memoir.
The installation of this series nearly killed me. They were unframed and we have an alcove in our entry gallery that was perfectly sized for a dense grid of 4 rows of seven drawings. After some higher math-
I decided I would sandwich two pieces of archival foamcore 1" shy all around of the drawing dimension and "float" the drawing by attaching the rear most foam core piece to the wall. I knew I couldn't use traditional picture hooks or nails as I would never get the precision I needed in the very tight grid. To add insult to injury the drawings were not all exactly the same size. I knew I needed to use some kind of archival and removable adhesive-maybe two different types-to attach the foamcore to the wall and the drawing to the foamcore. I also knew I would drive myself insane if I did not use some sort of laser leveling device to stay accurately on the grid. I called my friend Brad at the Nasher Museum and borrowed his laser. OMG you can never go back!! I drank the Kool-aid immediately and went out and bought myself the same model. Ellen, aka Vinyl girl, magically transformed into Laser Girl and was a huge help.
We got the TidyCat option for the final row.
I called a bunch of folks I thought might have experience with archival adhesives and got a bunch of different recommendations. I had this grid of 28 plus another grid of 15 drawings to do in the upstairs gallery. Doing Japanese hinges with archival paste was just too labor intensive. I did sort of a hail Mary buy on Amazon to experiment with different options:
I tried velcro, glue dots, scrapbooking tape, sticky putty, and various 3M picture hanging products. Just when I thought I had the perfect solution we would hear the dreaded plop in the middle of the night of a drawing falling off the wall and I'd have to look for another option. The wall is painted with a special super flat zero VOC paint and apparently it is formulated so NOTHING will stick to it. The bond between the drawing and the foam core was holding pretty well but the interface between the foam core and the wall was the failure point. Fortunately this was also the interface where I didn't have archival concerns. I tried heavy tapes including gaffer tape and they all eventually failed. Just when I was about the throw in the towel I remembered this product I had found to keep pictures from tilting on the wall that I had used years ago-basically like a push pin but with no head-just an flat adhesive plate. I finally tracked them down and attached them to the back of the foam core, held the drawings in place, and then forced the spikes into the drywall. I was very proud of myself until the barrier between the plastic plate and the double stick tape on these things started to fail leaving the pins in the wall and the drawing on the floor! I then figured out a way to put gaffer tape over the entire assembly with the spike sticking through and that ultimately proved to be the thing that worked. Whew.
All of the frustration melted away in the chance to work everyday with Ippy and Neil. They assisted with every aspect of the installation including the lighting.
Preparing the large "blow-up" botanical banners for hanging.
Installing "Escape from Eden"-an almost inhumanly detailed series of connected drawings that took over a year to complete and are installed in a beautiful custom wood case.
The show ended up looking just spectacular. Ippy was elated and I am as proud of it as any show I have done at Cassilhaus.(following five installation photos by Roger Haile)
We settled on the title Lifelines for the exhibition. In addition to the many hyperdetailed drawings we included a series of very loose charcoal life drawings and the title just seem to encompass all of the work so well.
I am at risk of making the longest blog post ever but there is so much to cover. I will close with images from the opening in May and Ippy's amazing artist talk in June.
Thank you Ippy!
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
Jorge Luis Borges
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