Kelda Van Patten
My work starts with temporary three dimensional constructions that draw from kitsch and "feminine" stereotypes. I define kitsch not as gaudy objects considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but as defined by Celeste Olalquiaga in The Artificial Kingdom, a book about the roots of kitsch during the Victorian era. As such, I think of kitsch as myth, or curiosities that evoke desire and comfort, while masking denial and loss.
Once photographed, I continue my work in a digital dark room, such as Photoshop, where I might integrate scanned objects or low res jpegs off the internet. My photographic investigations live within a chaotic framework where the very identity of a photograph is in question; the perceived truth of the medium is interrogated.
The photographs that I constructed for this series are a contemporary and feminist take on the traditional concept of the "dining room picture," or early 20th century American still-life painting. I'm exploring what the still life genre reveals during a time when image inundation and simulacra are ubiquitous; in today's age of late capitalism. By photographing "real space" and editing layers of digital information, I am exploring surprise and contradiction through the consideration of spaces in between artifice and truth, imagination and the real, and mimesis and the origin.