Name: Ebony G. Patterson Opening Reception
Start: 2024-09-21T17:00:00-04:00
End: 2024-09-21T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art

Ebony G. Patterson Opening Reception

Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art

Join us for the opening reception of ...three kings weep..., a large-scale video installation by Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson.

Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA) presents, ...three kings weep..., a large-scale video installation by Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson, on view September 21–December 14, 2024, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). Join us for the Opening Reception at Tephra ICA on Saturday, September 21, from 5–7pm, featuring a talk by Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VMFA. RSVPs strongly encouraged. About the Exhibition: Experience the visuals, sound, and emotion in a large-scale video installation by Ebony G. Patterson. Shown slowly in reverse, Patterson’s film portrays a trilogy of three men, each on a separate screen, dressing themselves while tears quietly roll down their cheeks. Like the triptych paintings often found on the altar pieces at the front of churches built during the Renaissance, these figures occupy a chapel-like space where viewers can sit and contemplate their presence.The voice of a young boy reading the poem "If We Must Die," by Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, frames the scene. McKay wrote his poem, published in 1919, following weeks of race riots dubbed "the Red Summer," in which hundreds of African Americans were killed during attacks on Black communities in several cities across America. One hundred years later, Patterson reiterates McKay’s words as a soundtrack to her visually arresting work, exposing the continued vulnerability of Black bodies in our present society. About the Artist: Ebony G. Patterson is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist who lives and works between Kingston, Jamaica and Chicago, IL. Patterson’s expansive practice addresses visibility and invisibility, through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry and acts of violence in the context of “postcolonial” spaces. With the strong sensibility of a painter, Patterson works across multiple media - including tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, drawing and installation - united by her consistent visual language and intention. Each work is intricately embellished and densely layered, in order to draw the viewer closer and to question how we engage in the act of looking. Entrancing and colorful, Patterson’s works command the viewer to look beyond their rich formal characteristics and to acknowledge the realities of social injustice.

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Ebony G. Patterson Opening Reception

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Ebony G. Patterson Opening Reception

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