Patrick Quarm’s exhibition, SILHOUETTES: Tracing Memory, is an astonishing depiction of human complexity and hybrid identity. Through painting and collage, Quarm displays layered, 3-dimensional portraits of contemporary black bodies that share cross-cultural spaces.
The largest work in the room, Oasis of Memory, is a brightly colored, five-layered painting suspended from the ceiling. Visitors are invited to take a 360 degree approach, which encourages the public to engage the space between canvases and become a part of the picture. This interactive and inclusionary component is also an empathetic tool Quarm employs to welcome a closer look at the details. When standing directly in front or behind, a whole portrait can be accessed, and the form of a black female emerges. The woman is seen holding a blue rose behind her back. Like the additive nature of a hybrid, contemporary identity, blue roses can only occur through absorption – a tender footnote on human adaptability.
A painting for Quarm is a window to a particular time or moment in his life. In the window series, he begins shrinking certain portions of the paintings and suspending moments within the larger frame. Quarm mimics the window set up in his parents’ house during his most impressionable years. Silhouetted bodies are present in Abstract Reflections and repeated throughout the exhibit. This negative space aims for ambiguity, allowing the audience to see themselves here, alongside Quarm, as he and the viewer move between cultural worlds.
In the Specimen vitrine series, Quarm embraces a new process which achieves an unexpected outcome. Ripping through collaged and painted fabrics, his portraits take on a new, deconstructed form. The found vitrines, sourced from a San Antonio flea market during his residency at Artpace, once held sentimental artifacts. Their history holds the same human connection, admiration, and contemplation that Quarm’s work illustrates.
The exhibition SILHOUETTES: Tracing Memory is a new direction for Patrick Quarm, a step beyond the canvas and an expansion into the sculptural realm. He punches holes and removes shapes as a form of erasure, yet each fractured image lends itself to the fuller vision. Playing with layers and stratifying portraits continues to be a process of resistance for Quarm, rejecting the flattening of identity as one moves through different cultural landscapes. Every painted layer is essential to the larger portrait, illuminating the complexity of the human spirit and the multitude it contains. Like a window, these mixed-media works serve as portals into Quarm’s life and offer glimpses of his journey alongside beloved people and spaces.
–Ada Smith Genitempo, Residencies and Exhibitions Manager
