Patrick Killoran, Passage, 2018. Site-specific installation. Courtesy of the artist. Installed at the Central branch of the Queens Library.
Patrick Killoran, Passage, 2018. Site-specific installation. Courtesy of the artist. Installed at the Central branch of the Queens Library.
Patrick Killoran, Passage, 2018. Site-specific installation. Courtesy of the artist. Installed at the Central branch of the Queens Library.
Patrick Killoran, Passage, 2018. Site-specific installation. Courtesy of the artist. Installed at the Central branch of the Queens Library.
Patrick Killoran, Passage, 2018. Site-specific installation. Courtesy of the artist. Installed at the Central branch of the Queens Library.
Patrick Killoran
I arrived at my current project for Volumes by spending time at Queens Central Library and having in-depth conversations with the staff. I realized how, for most people, research is dominated by what we ubiquitously refer to as 'Googling'. Before that term, we said 'search'. The library is a place that embodies the idea of a search. Past generations might have considered the library as a site of purely cerebral activity, a place to think and plan. Ironically, the internet has displaced the library as the premiere site of what we now call the virtual—so the library has reemerged as a physical space for an embodied and social production of knowledge. (Although new technology is present at the library, it is in relation to the possibilities of its social space and not in isolation.) I wanted to make a project that extends the logic of the library as a site where the patron’s physical presence lends an element of specificity to their research, as a product of lived experience.
Many of my projects represent themselves as one thing and upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be something else. Creating a moment of sustained skepticism in the face of what was once taken for granted is fundamental to my work. In this process of discovery, the viewer naturally transitions to a critical point of view. Making the viewer aware of this mental transition eliminates the dependence on the institutional frame i.e. the museum's role of designating what is and is not art. A few minutes spent watching patrons at the library reveals a place teeming with different types of mental activity. My hope is to broaden the scope of those transitions, making works that physically/intellectually engage the patron.
Volumes gives me an opportunity to be part of a major exhibition but at the same time present a project outside the traditional gallery space. So many of the concepts addressed in Volumes are embodied in the function of the library. Because many of my past projects are situated outside the confines of the gallery they are often defined exclusively in terms of an oppositional relationship to institutional discourse. Volumes produces a situation where instead, offsite work is experienced as an expansion of a visual arts discourse rather than as a departure from it.
Patrick Killoran (b. 1972, Newtown Square, PA) received his BFA from Tyler School of Art (1995). He has presented solo projects at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut; Ikon in Birmingham, United Kingdom; Sculpture Center in Long Island City; and Samuel Freeman Gallery in Los Angeles. Killoran has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including the 1998 Biennale of Sydney; the Wanås Foundation in Sweden; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX. In 2014 he participated in The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Civitella Ranieri in Umbertide, Italy. He has been awarded a Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant, Penny McCall Foundation grant, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities fellowship at Northwestern University (2010), and the Department of Fine Arts fellowship at George Washington University (2013). Currently he is the 2018 External Examiner at the Iceland of the Arts Academy and a Collaborator at SOMA Summer in Mexico City. Since 2012, Killoran has been a Critic at Yale University School of Art, Sculpture. He is based in Jackson Heights, Queens.
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