Patrick McElnea
pmcelnea@gmail.comPatrick McElnea (b. 1981) is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. In painting and drawing he combines the visual ephemera of his Hollywood neighborhood, where LED tree silhouettes and corporate logos get recast in transparent pigment and collaged motifs. From studies that disassemble commercial and organic encounters throughout the city, he locates moments of slippage, pathogen, and attachment. The work shown here continues McElnea’s interest in abstraction since the industrialization, languages of form and color that are both administered and personal.
-- McElnea’s third-person statement
Patrick McElnea (b. 1981), a Los Angeles-based artist, navigates the liminal spaces between the tangible and the ethereal through his paintings and mixed-media works. His practice excavates overlooked urban detritus—ephemeral shadows, fractured screens, and ambient whispers—translating them into layered compositions of diaphanous pigments and disrupted patterns. Deploying strategies of détournement, these quotidian artifacts are alchemized into psychological landscapes to locate moments of disjuncture, pathology, and affective attachment within the administered languages of industrialized form and color. They function as thresholds, revealing the spectral remnants of corporate iconography to unveil latent connections.
-- Claude.ai’s rewrite of McElnea’s statement
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McElnea has had solo exhibitions at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY and Daniel Weinburg Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Group shows include KIT, Düsseldorf; Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago; CAVE Detroit; Emerson Dorsch, Miami; David Nolan Gallery, New York; and Marc Jancou Gallery, New York. He has curated exhibitions at project spaces MiM in Los Angeles, and P-r-i-m-e-t-i-m-e in Brooklyn, NY. Residencies include PRAKSIS in Oslo, Norway. Collections include the Rubell Museum in Miami. McElnea received his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2008, and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2004. Academic appointments include Vassar College, The Cooper Union, The University of Redlands, The University of San Diego, SUNY Buffalo, and Buffalo State College.
for a nearby room
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