Someday you’ll be gone. Dead. But perhaps someone might come across your photograph. Maybe a distant relative, maybe a stranger who bought a box of old things at a secondhand store, and inside, a photo of you. What might this someone think of you?
“I’m really interested in family photographs, especially abandoned family photographs, and the meanings that they represent, both as containers of memory as well as links to history and a past that we may not necessarily know or understand,” multi-disciplinary artist Daisy Patton explained in a Zoom interview. “So often we look at the past as this separate box that’s separate from us.”
In her exhibition, Before These Witnesses, in Cuesta College’s Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery, Patton has collected old wedding photos and created bright, embellished artworks from them.
“The work is supposed to be creating this living archive of memory. Questions like, who do we remember and why are really intrinsic to the work. Those are political questions as much as a social questions as much as personal questions,” she said.
Patton’s created many series in this style with various themes, and one series grows out of another. Her Cuesta show is about weddings, but she’s now working on a show about bereavement, which she calls another kind of love—a love mixed with grief.
This show, however, delves into wedding photos and all the baggage they entail. Her goal was to avoid a “fluffy, nothing show, a kind of a froufrou thing. I’ve been collecting for weddings almost since the beginning of the series, and I was trying really hard to figure out how to make a show about weddings that wouldn’t reinforce stereotypes.”
Weddings, after all, are a beloved ritual where everything is supposed to be just perfect.
“I was interested in the tropes of a formal wedding portrait. And what is it saying? From a personal level, an aesthetic level, a social level, a political level,” she said.
Patton thinks a lot about different cultures and family ties. She was born in Los Angeles to a Southern white woman and an Iranian father she never met. Her childhood moved between California and Oklahoma and their very different cultural landscapes. She currently calls Massachusetts home.
“I always think that I’m going to be like a salmon that returns to the spawning grounds again, and you know, [LA] still holds like a huge place in my heart,” she said. “Unfortunately, having multiple sclerosis, heat is something that’s very challenging for me.”
Despite her disability, she works large, and her approach is extremely time consuming. In fact, her style has been called “maximalism” because the works are so colorful and so festooned with flowers, embroidery, French knots—often hundreds of them in a single piece—that there’s a kind of hyper-ornateness.
“If you walk into Persian mosques or old Catholic churches, they’re spiritual spaces. They’re meant to be overwhelming. They’re meant to put the people who walk into them into a state of awe,” she said.
Same for her artworks: “They’re actually supposed to overwhelm you.”
They’re also mesmerizing, breathing new life into these castaway photos.
“Beauty is something that is a tool that can bring in audiences to sort of sit and think about what they’re looking at. For me, the idea of painting over photographs is sort of like marks of devotion and care that are on there,” Patton said.
The kneejerk reaction may be to think that she’s defacing these photographs, but she notes, first, that she’s not working on the original image, which she preserves and archives as “historical documents, really precious relics.”
“I have over 5,000 in my collection,” she noted.
She has a background in photography, so she reproduces and enlarges the image to life size and works on this duplicate. She also respects the photos enough to include all the information she has about them in her artworks’ titles—any when, where, or who she can find. Blown up to life size, they have a monumental quality.
“I want to have this one-to-one connection with the viewer and the [subject of the photo], and painting over them—instead of it being a defacement of violence—is a way of bringing this person to the present moment that you’re noticing them. They’re enveloped in these bright, fantastical colors. They’re surrounded by a pattern and beautification and embellishment,” she said.
Time, for Patton, isn’t linear. She noted that Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barbara Walters were all born the same year, 1929, and yet we think of them existing in very distinctly different eras.
“The ways in which we view the past can be through rose-tinted glass of nostalgia, which is tinged with sentimentality. And it’s also sort of distorted. I was just listening to Rage Against the Machine and ‘Killing in the Name Of,’ and it talks about those who control the past control the future, and the people who control the present control the past. I think those things are applicable and important.”
Because the photos she curates are old, most likely their subjects are dead, but, Patton notes, “They’re also not quite dead, because we’re remembering them by seeing them, and by witnessing them, they in turn are sort of visiting us.”
The idea she’s striving to communicate is that past people are not separate from us.
“We are them, they are us, and the more that we can understand that, the more we can have a more expansive understanding of both ourselves, of them, of humanity, and of time. All of these things, I think, enrich us and let us understand the moment that we’re currently in and what’s to come,” Patton said.
At the core, her work is about our shared human experience.
“I have this huge affection for humanity and people, and all the tiny details about them, and I think that there’s something important about being curious about each other and realizing we have so much in common, that our lives are so intertwined,” she said. “We’re all connected through space and time, and we would take better care of each other if we had that sort of recognition.” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Feb 20 – Mar 2, 2025.