Emotional Landscapes: Patricia Yossen

Downtown Art Center Gallery Announces

Emotional Landscapes: Patricia Yossen
March 12- April 9, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 12, 6-9pm

Los Angeles, CA – The Downtown Art Center is pleased to present Emotional Landscapes, its first solo exhibition with the Los Angeles-based Argentine artist Patricia Yossen.

In her work, Yossen uses a variety of media to explore space, her central theme, and its relationship to absence, distance and dislocation in the complex contemporary world.

Her most recent work approaches this theme through the use of landscape. Yossen takes one of the oldest and most time-honored topics of artistic inquiry, and unhinges it from traditional understandings of the subject. Stepping beyond conventional notions of “landscape,” she relies upon line, repetition and accumulation to populate otherwise undefined stretches of emptiness, providing clues to the size and proportion of the topic, but denying any sense of definition. Her landscapes are unbroken, but for the occasional vague figure.

Because of this, the spectator standing before Yossen’s work paradoxically finds herself in the vantage point with the best view of the landscape, yet is always outside it, removed from participation. This is the position of the traveler, the visitor, the alien and the alienated. As such, the work heightens the sense of removal and the impossibility of truly knowing that which we most wish to grasp.

In some of her work, the materials have been intricately and painstakingly placed, as in the title piece, “Emotional Landscape,” an installation built with thousands of steel needles collected from different clothing makers hammered into a spotless wall. Elsewhere, particularly in her drawing, the artist plays with the sweeping mineral textures of the charcoal. In all cases, the work develops the feeling of transience and loss.

Patricia Yossen was born in Santa Fe, Argentina in 1973. She studied art in Argentina and Mexico, where she worked for nearly a decade. In 2008, she finished her MFA in sculpture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She has shown her work in Argentina, Mexico, Canada, New York and Los Angeles. Currently, she lives and works in Los Angeles.

Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
For more information, please contact: info@dacgallery.com

DAC Gallery, 828 S Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90014
213-627-7374

DAC in participating in LA’s Downtown Art Walk, happening the second Thursday of every month.