BIOGRAPHY
BORN: 1974, Manchester, United Kingdom
LIVES: Tauhei, Waikato, New Zealand
AWARDS/DISTINCTIONS: Pingyao International Photography Festival - Supreme Art Photography Award (2015); Auckland Festival of Photography - Sacred Hill Annual Commission (2015); The Wallace Art Awards - Finalist (2015, 2013, 2012, 2009)
COLLECTIONS: The James Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland; The University of Waikato, Hamilton, Auckland Festival of Photography, Auckland
PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS: Urban Realms, Whakatane Museum, (2016); Pingyao International Photography Festival, China (2015); Auckland Festival of Photography, Silo 6, Auckland (2015); The Care Factor, Calder & Lawson Gallery, The University of Waikato, Hamilton (2013); Air New Zealand Fashion Week - Invited artist, Auckland (2010)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Feature by Adrian Hatwell, D-Photo magazine, Jun 2015; ’Compassion and Global Concern’ by Peter Dornauf, EyeContact, Mar, 2013; The Care Factor exhibition catalogue, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, 2013; ‘Moments fixed in time with still-life skills’ by Terry McNamara, The New Zealand Herald, Apr 2011; ‘Innocent victim or malevolent goddess?’, Art News New Zealand, Autumn 2010
ESSAYS
Peter Dornauf
Modernity has been out of favour since the late 60s when capitalism and consumerism and its omnivorous feeding habits began to be questioned by artists, philosophers and commentators alike.
Perhaps the abiding symbol of that shift in thinking can be detected in architecture where Modernist forms came to signify all that was wrong and life-denying about the Modern period. Born of a utopian impulse, utility and functionalism with its reductionist aesthetic – repetition, uniformity and monumentality – was something that later generations experienced as seriously flawed.
The dream failed spectacularly and artist PJ Paterson in his latest series of photographic works explores the on-going permutations from that fallout as it touches us today, providing a satirical critique of the heroic machine age.
All that is questionable about the Modernist dream is summed up in the artist’s digitally manipulated images where standardisation, repetition, domination and totalitarian uniformity get mocked both in title and treatment in his 2011 series, Glory.
Two images in particular ham up the heroic: Got Carter and Milton Friedman Highway. They echo both the Third Reich (think Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) and Hollywood musicals (Busby Berkeley) from the 1930s. The Friedman work parodies the fantasy of the ‘ideal’ world where greed is good and the market is God while Got Carter plays with Modernist follies by depicting women lined up in rigid military formation against a backdrop of a half dismantled 1960s tower block. The sepia colour of each image plays with the nostalgic irony of a brave new world that came unstuck.
The 2012 series, Symmetry, Repetition and Noise, presents antithetical images to the dream of progress, each one capturing the dystopian outcome of Modernist overreach. In digitally collaged photographs, Paterson confronts a capitalist economy that has at its heart a consumerist compulsion founded upon built-in obsolescence. The artist creates some of the most arresting and audacious imagery with collaged material, using clever twists and juxtapositions that are germane to the subject. With a simple shift of perspective, a change of one or two elements, he achieves enough distance and shift of angle to provide disturbing disclosure.
Place and proportion is Paterson’s trope. One of the most powerful images using this technique comes from a work entitled The Valley. The digitally manipulated photograph delivers a startling apocalyptic vision that pictures a concourse of discarded wrecked cars disgorged into some remote and mist-shrouded ravine gushing down toward the viewer in a cascading morass of rusting metal. Images like these have the power and potential to become iconic posters for political cause.
The artist’s tilt at Modernity continues in his latest series. Using an analogue method of ‘painting’, he works with the face of the sixties fashion model Twiggy, in order to explore notions of visual illusion, disposability and appropriation.
Paterson is an astute observer of the contemporary condition, an artist with political conscience, creating images that tease, disturb and disrupt the viewer’s expectations by turn, while employing allusions that function with meticulous craft and sly ingenuity.
Warwick Brown
The invention of digital photography in 1975, and subsequent computer programs that enabled photographers to alter and add to their pictures, changed photography profoundly. It suddenly became much more than ‘point and shoot’; more than just being on the spot at the right time. Critics and the public realised that the digital age opened up a whole new field of creativity, providing new tools to make art. Painters no longer had a monopoly on the invented image. The challenge hadn’t changed – bad photographers could and would still make bad work. But good photographers could now become visionaries.
Forty years on, P J Paterson has it both ways, as a photorealist painter and as a photographer. He is an undoubted visionary, and carries us breathless and amazed into his created worlds. Because they are composed of bits of reality, the sense of strangeness and wonder is much greater than, say, what one feels when viewing a Dali painting. We know Dali made it all up out of his head; with Paterson we know that he didn’t. Those acres of junked cars, those endless ranks of bicycles, those intimate close-up heads – they are real, the detail is so mesmerising. And those distant hills hung with low cloud – anyone familiar with wild New Zealand landscapes will recognise them at once. Dali takes us to places of utter fantasy, where giraffes burn and watches melt. Paterson takes us to places that once were, are, and may yet be.
Paterson looks to a past full of optimism and a future full of dread. Demographers tell us the world population will hit 9 billion by 2050, most of these people being crammed into cities. Many large cities are already starting to degenerate into commercial enclaves surrounded by awful slums and piles of garbage. When such terminal trash-glut overruns New Zealand we know that humankind will be on its last legs. As no people appear in Paterson’s photographs – even those depicting metropolises like Shanghai –perhaps the end has already come.
Paterson’s photographic works came about through a confluence of circumstances. During visits to the famous ‘Smash Palace’ wrecking yard in the Central North Island of New Zealand he took numerous photos to use as reference shots for the paintings he was making at the time. Not long after, he travelled to Europe to live in a small town in Portugal where his struggle finding studio space and materials to paint with led to experiments with Photoshop. He began to make digital collages from the car photos he had taken, still with a view to painting them eventually. It took him a month of solid work to produce the first ‘Car wreck’ piece (Glory 2011); it was only then that he thought that it would work better as a photograph than a painting. While Paterson’s first few works were pieced together from images that he had on hand, nowadays when he travels he takes a large number of images, amassing the source material that will one day form the basis of his work.
Describing his working methods Paterson says: “I think in the past I have seen the two strands of my art practice as being quite separate; the painting was a bit lighter and influenced by pop art, while the photography was usually darker and more political. But I think in the last few months they are coming closer together. I tend to think of my painting process as being like a human dot matrix printer, so it’s not entirely removed from printing a digital photo.” He also sees a practical advantage in maintaining two parts to his practice: “When I have just made paintings for a few months, I have usually exhausted myself physically and mentally; so it is great to be able to switch to the camera and computer to do something different.”
Despite the provocative content of his works, Paterson does not see himself as a devoted environmental crusader, or exclusively anti-capitalist. He can see both sides of the picture. This vision is well expressed in Yu Garden, 2015, where spectral buildings under construction loom behind an abandoned armchair. One feels that little true comfort will be found in the new habitations, but the people must be housed. In this way Paterson documents the dichotomy inherent in modern society – affording undreamt-of advantages, along with intensive land-use and waste – as we drift inexorably towards megacity development.
Natasha Matila-Smith
At the heart of PJ Paterson’s practice lies an interest in failed utopias. Using the methods of photography and painting, the artist addresses the issues which have placed society in its current state of environmental and psychological duress. These works act almost like prophecies of possible things to come, warning that society is aware of its failings, yet currently inept at thwarting its own imminent downfall. Some themes that emerge within his works include overpopulation, overconsumption and blind worship of the rich and famous. The recurring visitation of these themes and concerns suggest these are pressing issues for Paterson and, through his art, he communicates a need for these questionable values to be re-evaluated.
Paterson’s immersive photography and moving image works depict urban wastelands; cars sprawled under an overcast sky, multitudes of bicycles, rundown automobiles, a disturbing horizon of uniform houses and perfectly groomed lawns that mirror some kind of Stepfordian dream. Through these digitally manipulated photographic compositions, Paterson comments on the insurmountable excess produced by human beings. Though presenting multitudes of derelict materials and commodities, these images are curiously devoid of the presence of actual human bodies. Paterson portrays a certain destiny where we no longer exist – humans are mortal after all. Problematically we have reached a paradoxical impasse, where the virtually invulnerable remnants and objects that often define our existence will far outlive us. These constructed landscapes, although amplified, are not completely inconceivable, with products that were created for convenience now taking hundreds of years to biodegrade (plastic drinking bottles, for example, have a lifespan of 450 years). Paterson repeatedly makes us aware of this shift in contemporary priorities, where our desires are practically insatiable and often dictated to us by advertising and the media.
The media and celebrity culture is explored through Paterson’s photorealist portraiture, where grids blur easily recognisable images of iconic celebrities. In the 2017 exhibition Panem et Circenses, the artist reproduced facial composites from widely distributed mugshots, making each celebrity’s charge the title of the work (Illegal Possession; Seduction and Adultery, etc). Much like those in a Western movie, the images are akin to ‘most wanted’ posters – blunt and face on, purely descriptive, lacking the glamour of a magazine photoshoot. It is here that Paterson confronts the viewer with the illusion of the celebrity; merely one component of a complex marketing machine. The celebrities in these images are human and flawed, though somewhat able to transcend their crimes through fame; alien to the world that most humans live in by the way they are portrayed in the media as rebellious and misunderstood. Paterson draws attention to this idolisation and fascination with famous people, yet he is dually drawn to the power dynamics at play between celebrity and fan. In referencing ‘60s rock era and punk artists, along with actors of classic films, Paterson kills his own darlings, implying that this kind of insidious advocacy was set in motion long before the pop stars of today’s generation exemplified these problems.
Paterson’s artistic process acts as an additional layer of interrogation. Through the labourious methodologies he employs within his painting and meticulously detailed digitally enhanced photography, Paterson flips painting and photography canons on their heads, challenging the notion of a ‘photorealistic’ finish. For the artist to depict what would normally be considered a photograph through painting and yet use composition and digital technology to essentially create a photograph, seems particularly deliberate. Paterson ultimately refuses to take the quick route, using his work to challenge and provoke thought about conventions. Very simply put, he directs viewers to slow down their thinking and investigate the images they are presented with, asking that people not take things at face value.
There are strong links between Paterson’s photography and portraiture works that speak to issues he perceives in today’s world. To Paterson, celebrity is a facade, a distraction, a selling point, as is the growing attachment between people and materials. In our modern world, status and the acquisition of wealth are seemingly more important than life itself. Politics and education reinforce skewed values and ideas from a young age, creating a culture that fosters obedience and prioritises class and social hierarchy. Paterson’s practice perfectly encapsulates our modern anxieties and fears, showing us exactly what these fears look like in his haunting and intricate artworks, with his visual realisations acting as deterrents, not determinants of what is in store for society.
BORN: 1974, Manchester, United Kingdom
LIVES: Tauhei, Waikato, New Zealand
AWARDS/DISTINCTIONS: Pingyao International Photography Festival - Supreme Art Photography Award (2015); Auckland Festival of Photography - Sacred Hill Annual Commission (2015); The Wallace Art Awards - Finalist (2015, 2013, 2012, 2009)
COLLECTIONS: The James Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland; The University of Waikato, Hamilton, Auckland Festival of Photography, Auckland
PUBLIC EXHIBITIONS: Urban Realms, Whakatane Museum, (2016); Pingyao International Photography Festival, China (2015); Auckland Festival of Photography, Silo 6, Auckland (2015); The Care Factor, Calder & Lawson Gallery, The University of Waikato, Hamilton (2013); Air New Zealand Fashion Week - Invited artist, Auckland (2010)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Feature by Adrian Hatwell, D-Photo magazine, Jun 2015; ’Compassion and Global Concern’ by Peter Dornauf, EyeContact, Mar, 2013; The Care Factor exhibition catalogue, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, 2013; ‘Moments fixed in time with still-life skills’ by Terry McNamara, The New Zealand Herald, Apr 2011; ‘Innocent victim or malevolent goddess?’, Art News New Zealand, Autumn 2010
ESSAYS
Peter Dornauf
Modernity has been out of favour since the late 60s when capitalism and consumerism and its omnivorous feeding habits began to be questioned by artists, philosophers and commentators alike.
Perhaps the abiding symbol of that shift in thinking can be detected in architecture where Modernist forms came to signify all that was wrong and life-denying about the Modern period. Born of a utopian impulse, utility and functionalism with its reductionist aesthetic – repetition, uniformity and monumentality – was something that later generations experienced as seriously flawed.
The dream failed spectacularly and artist PJ Paterson in his latest series of photographic works explores the on-going permutations from that fallout as it touches us today, providing a satirical critique of the heroic machine age.
All that is questionable about the Modernist dream is summed up in the artist’s digitally manipulated images where standardisation, repetition, domination and totalitarian uniformity get mocked both in title and treatment in his 2011 series, Glory.
Two images in particular ham up the heroic: Got Carter and Milton Friedman Highway. They echo both the Third Reich (think Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) and Hollywood musicals (Busby Berkeley) from the 1930s. The Friedman work parodies the fantasy of the ‘ideal’ world where greed is good and the market is God while Got Carter plays with Modernist follies by depicting women lined up in rigid military formation against a backdrop of a half dismantled 1960s tower block. The sepia colour of each image plays with the nostalgic irony of a brave new world that came unstuck.
The 2012 series, Symmetry, Repetition and Noise, presents antithetical images to the dream of progress, each one capturing the dystopian outcome of Modernist overreach. In digitally collaged photographs, Paterson confronts a capitalist economy that has at its heart a consumerist compulsion founded upon built-in obsolescence. The artist creates some of the most arresting and audacious imagery with collaged material, using clever twists and juxtapositions that are germane to the subject. With a simple shift of perspective, a change of one or two elements, he achieves enough distance and shift of angle to provide disturbing disclosure.
Place and proportion is Paterson’s trope. One of the most powerful images using this technique comes from a work entitled The Valley. The digitally manipulated photograph delivers a startling apocalyptic vision that pictures a concourse of discarded wrecked cars disgorged into some remote and mist-shrouded ravine gushing down toward the viewer in a cascading morass of rusting metal. Images like these have the power and potential to become iconic posters for political cause.
The artist’s tilt at Modernity continues in his latest series. Using an analogue method of ‘painting’, he works with the face of the sixties fashion model Twiggy, in order to explore notions of visual illusion, disposability and appropriation.
Paterson is an astute observer of the contemporary condition, an artist with political conscience, creating images that tease, disturb and disrupt the viewer’s expectations by turn, while employing allusions that function with meticulous craft and sly ingenuity.
Warwick Brown
The invention of digital photography in 1975, and subsequent computer programs that enabled photographers to alter and add to their pictures, changed photography profoundly. It suddenly became much more than ‘point and shoot’; more than just being on the spot at the right time. Critics and the public realised that the digital age opened up a whole new field of creativity, providing new tools to make art. Painters no longer had a monopoly on the invented image. The challenge hadn’t changed – bad photographers could and would still make bad work. But good photographers could now become visionaries.
Forty years on, P J Paterson has it both ways, as a photorealist painter and as a photographer. He is an undoubted visionary, and carries us breathless and amazed into his created worlds. Because they are composed of bits of reality, the sense of strangeness and wonder is much greater than, say, what one feels when viewing a Dali painting. We know Dali made it all up out of his head; with Paterson we know that he didn’t. Those acres of junked cars, those endless ranks of bicycles, those intimate close-up heads – they are real, the detail is so mesmerising. And those distant hills hung with low cloud – anyone familiar with wild New Zealand landscapes will recognise them at once. Dali takes us to places of utter fantasy, where giraffes burn and watches melt. Paterson takes us to places that once were, are, and may yet be.
Paterson looks to a past full of optimism and a future full of dread. Demographers tell us the world population will hit 9 billion by 2050, most of these people being crammed into cities. Many large cities are already starting to degenerate into commercial enclaves surrounded by awful slums and piles of garbage. When such terminal trash-glut overruns New Zealand we know that humankind will be on its last legs. As no people appear in Paterson’s photographs – even those depicting metropolises like Shanghai –perhaps the end has already come.
Paterson’s photographic works came about through a confluence of circumstances. During visits to the famous ‘Smash Palace’ wrecking yard in the Central North Island of New Zealand he took numerous photos to use as reference shots for the paintings he was making at the time. Not long after, he travelled to Europe to live in a small town in Portugal where his struggle finding studio space and materials to paint with led to experiments with Photoshop. He began to make digital collages from the car photos he had taken, still with a view to painting them eventually. It took him a month of solid work to produce the first ‘Car wreck’ piece (Glory 2011); it was only then that he thought that it would work better as a photograph than a painting. While Paterson’s first few works were pieced together from images that he had on hand, nowadays when he travels he takes a large number of images, amassing the source material that will one day form the basis of his work.
Describing his working methods Paterson says: “I think in the past I have seen the two strands of my art practice as being quite separate; the painting was a bit lighter and influenced by pop art, while the photography was usually darker and more political. But I think in the last few months they are coming closer together. I tend to think of my painting process as being like a human dot matrix printer, so it’s not entirely removed from printing a digital photo.” He also sees a practical advantage in maintaining two parts to his practice: “When I have just made paintings for a few months, I have usually exhausted myself physically and mentally; so it is great to be able to switch to the camera and computer to do something different.”
Despite the provocative content of his works, Paterson does not see himself as a devoted environmental crusader, or exclusively anti-capitalist. He can see both sides of the picture. This vision is well expressed in Yu Garden, 2015, where spectral buildings under construction loom behind an abandoned armchair. One feels that little true comfort will be found in the new habitations, but the people must be housed. In this way Paterson documents the dichotomy inherent in modern society – affording undreamt-of advantages, along with intensive land-use and waste – as we drift inexorably towards megacity development.
Natasha Matila-Smith
At the heart of PJ Paterson’s practice lies an interest in failed utopias. Using the methods of photography and painting, the artist addresses the issues which have placed society in its current state of environmental and psychological duress. These works act almost like prophecies of possible things to come, warning that society is aware of its failings, yet currently inept at thwarting its own imminent downfall. Some themes that emerge within his works include overpopulation, overconsumption and blind worship of the rich and famous. The recurring visitation of these themes and concerns suggest these are pressing issues for Paterson and, through his art, he communicates a need for these questionable values to be re-evaluated.
Paterson’s immersive photography and moving image works depict urban wastelands; cars sprawled under an overcast sky, multitudes of bicycles, rundown automobiles, a disturbing horizon of uniform houses and perfectly groomed lawns that mirror some kind of Stepfordian dream. Through these digitally manipulated photographic compositions, Paterson comments on the insurmountable excess produced by human beings. Though presenting multitudes of derelict materials and commodities, these images are curiously devoid of the presence of actual human bodies. Paterson portrays a certain destiny where we no longer exist – humans are mortal after all. Problematically we have reached a paradoxical impasse, where the virtually invulnerable remnants and objects that often define our existence will far outlive us. These constructed landscapes, although amplified, are not completely inconceivable, with products that were created for convenience now taking hundreds of years to biodegrade (plastic drinking bottles, for example, have a lifespan of 450 years). Paterson repeatedly makes us aware of this shift in contemporary priorities, where our desires are practically insatiable and often dictated to us by advertising and the media.
The media and celebrity culture is explored through Paterson’s photorealist portraiture, where grids blur easily recognisable images of iconic celebrities. In the 2017 exhibition Panem et Circenses, the artist reproduced facial composites from widely distributed mugshots, making each celebrity’s charge the title of the work (Illegal Possession; Seduction and Adultery, etc). Much like those in a Western movie, the images are akin to ‘most wanted’ posters – blunt and face on, purely descriptive, lacking the glamour of a magazine photoshoot. It is here that Paterson confronts the viewer with the illusion of the celebrity; merely one component of a complex marketing machine. The celebrities in these images are human and flawed, though somewhat able to transcend their crimes through fame; alien to the world that most humans live in by the way they are portrayed in the media as rebellious and misunderstood. Paterson draws attention to this idolisation and fascination with famous people, yet he is dually drawn to the power dynamics at play between celebrity and fan. In referencing ‘60s rock era and punk artists, along with actors of classic films, Paterson kills his own darlings, implying that this kind of insidious advocacy was set in motion long before the pop stars of today’s generation exemplified these problems.
Paterson’s artistic process acts as an additional layer of interrogation. Through the labourious methodologies he employs within his painting and meticulously detailed digitally enhanced photography, Paterson flips painting and photography canons on their heads, challenging the notion of a ‘photorealistic’ finish. For the artist to depict what would normally be considered a photograph through painting and yet use composition and digital technology to essentially create a photograph, seems particularly deliberate. Paterson ultimately refuses to take the quick route, using his work to challenge and provoke thought about conventions. Very simply put, he directs viewers to slow down their thinking and investigate the images they are presented with, asking that people not take things at face value.
There are strong links between Paterson’s photography and portraiture works that speak to issues he perceives in today’s world. To Paterson, celebrity is a facade, a distraction, a selling point, as is the growing attachment between people and materials. In our modern world, status and the acquisition of wealth are seemingly more important than life itself. Politics and education reinforce skewed values and ideas from a young age, creating a culture that fosters obedience and prioritises class and social hierarchy. Paterson’s practice perfectly encapsulates our modern anxieties and fears, showing us exactly what these fears look like in his haunting and intricate artworks, with his visual realisations acting as deterrents, not determinants of what is in store for society.
