Current exhibition
"between a rock and a hard place" Patricia Strickland October 10th to November 2nd
In allied fashion, Patricia was born on April 7th, 1964, the last of the boomers to German- American parents. Propelled into the role of an involuntary outsider as a child due to frequent uprooting, she was not yet aware of the advantages of growing up bilingual and across two continents. Yet curious and engaged, she came to realize that living in many different places-repeatedly at the heart of transition and change-nurtured her moral, social, and intellectual independence.
The absence of family structures compelled her into dialogue with whatever environment and city she found herself in, whether grounded, rooted places like London, New York, Berlin, Boston, Heidelberg, Zurich, and West Central Texas, or more escapist havens such as Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, Los Angeles, Monaco, Ibiza, and San Francisco. Each location that became home at one stage generated an inner tension. That tension and duality formed the foundation of her work and its subjects more profoundly than any lectures at university. Every idea she brought into being arose from the textures, contrasts, and rhythms of the many cities that raised her-places whose spirit continues to resonate through her practice.
# PHI Macro Level: A Study in Human Geometry /seven bronze cast polished cubes, engraved/
In this sculptural work, the artist creates a three-dimensional embodiment of the golden ratio ()-a form long admired for its connection to natural harmony and aesthetic perfection-reinterpreting it as a **mathematical allegory for the psychological and sociological architecture of human society.
The piece is composed of seven bronze squares, cast in increasing and then decreasing sizes, reflecting a golden curve of growth and decline. This arc is not random; it is a deliberate structure drawn from π divided into harmonic proportions, underscoring the tension and resonance between order, beauty, and the underlying mathematics of life.Each square bears a single Latin engraving, inscribed on its reflective surface.
The sequence begins with "Initiatus", the initiator— small, potent, and rare. It progresses through "Innovatus" (the innovator) and "Liberalis" (the progressive), culminating in the largest square "Mediocris", representing the central mass of society. Then, the scale gently recedes through "Conservatus" (the conservative), "Moderatus" (the moderating force), and finally returns to near its initial size with "Rigidus" (the rigid), the resistant to change. This symmetrical flow evokes the cyclical nature of societal evolution, in which movements begin with the few, expand to the many, and contract again into resistance or redefinition. These archetypes are not static societal classes, but enduring character traits or motivational patterns that surface repeatedly across eras, cultures, and even within a single individual. The artist invites us to consider that each of us houses this full spectrum, experiencing a mosaic of often contradictory impulses-hope and fear, progress and preservation. By casting the work in bronze-a material associated with permanence, value, and reflection-the artist offers not only durability, but a mirror-like surface to remind us of our capacity to choose awareness over automation. This is a meditation on self and society, mathematics and myth, structure and spirit-rooted in antiquity, rendered in timeless form.
Info on PHI and Golden Ratio: First traced in the mathematics of ancient Egypt and Babylon, п emerges as the ratio binding a circle's circumference to its diameter a number without end, forever unfolding. Centuries later, embody another kind of perfection: a proportion of balance and beauty recurring in nature and art. Where п reveals infinity and the mystery of cycles, captures harmony and form. Together they reflect humanity's twin pursuit of the immeasurable and the ideal.
# Tribute to Audio / Wall instalation, Watercut aluminum plate, engraved, nickel plated WAV-file visualization, 190 x max 70 cm, LED backlit/
Tribute to Audio is an homage to sound.
This project visually captures resonant and evocative fragments of divers forms of audio. When in the early nineties WAV files began to escape the confines of studio use and enter public consciousness, I discovered the perfect medium to honor certain creators of music, speech, cinematic dialogue, sounds of nature and sonic expression, rendering their impulses into the language of form. Each inspiration is transformed into a visual waveform, precise and literal, executed in water-cut, engraved and galvanized aluminum. These plates are transmutations of auditive perception, giving body to the intangible.
The curated sound bits span musical epochs, genres, media recordings, contemporary compositions, dialogues that echo in cultural memory, each chosen by intuitive resonance. The subjective selection is shaped by personal impact and lived experience, yet each work gestures outward, paying homage to the vast lineage of sonic creation.
Tribute to audio is a manifestation of transition: the movement from digital abstraction into tangible form, crystallizing the paradox of audio itself - transient in life, yet capable, once transformed, of enduring in form. Ephemerality made permanent.
# Compound /White marble, engraved 100 cubes per city LA, NY, London/
Compound is an ongoing sculptural project that reflects on the city as a collective human construct while acknowledging its profound role in my own life. Each iteration consists of one hundred white marble cubes, their surfaces engraved with names of individuals-both real and fictional-who have, in ways monumental or modest, shaped the identity of a metropolis.
The first three cities represented are London, New York, and Los Angeles-places I lived in, that educated me, and that offered shifting vantage points from which to perceive society.I have always been drawn to stone piles in cities-temporary accumulations of cobblestones awaiting their next use. Once part of a surface that allowed pedestrians to move smoothly ahead, they now stand in suspension, waiting to become part of a new order. For me, they embody the transient nature of urban development: permanence and impermanence folded into each other. Compound echoes this quality, its cubes resembling both foundations and fragments, both monument and debris.
The chosen names from all backgrounds, settlers, politicians, industrialists, artists, laborers, fictional figures-acknowledge that a city is not built by elites alone, but by countless visible and invisible participants. Yet the choices of whom to include are inevitably subjective and can only ever represent a fraction of what any metropolis truly requires to emerge, expand, and endure. The work is therefore both analytical and personal: a selective homage shaped by research, memory, and lived experience, but always gesturing toward the immeasurable multiplicity that defines a city.In Compound, marble's weight and permanence contrast with the ceaseless flux of urban life, crystallizing the paradox of cities: enduring in form, yet forever provisional in meaning.
# Date Night on the Rocks / variable installation, white marble, engraved bronze cast tabletop 60 x 60 cm/
Date Night on the Rocks stages an unstable architecture of intimacy through a formal vocabulary that collapses sculpture, furniture, and relational aesthetics. Eschewing conventional legibility and support structures, the artist constructs two seating units and a table entirely from roughly-hewn white marble boulders, each carefully balanced to form a composition that is as contingent as it is deliberate. The absence of traditional function foregrounds the work's preoccupation with emotional precarity and performative domesticity. The centerpiece-a 60 x 60 cm cast bronze tabletop, slightly tilted-introduces a material and symbolic counterpoint to the stone assemblage. Its hyper-polished surface invites both reflection and distortion, complicating the viewer's visual and conceptual engagement. The engraved phrase "If I throw up, will you hold back my hair?" operates as a fragment of conversational intimacy, hovering between abjection and care, irony and sincerity. A second inscription "Jaded Yet?" etched into one of the marble seats, signals emotional exhaustion within the iterative cycles of romantic exchange.
Through its interplay of permanence and instability, polish and rupture, Date Night on the Rocks interrogates the architecture of the couple as both sculptural and psychological construct. The piece echoes minimalist concerns with form and balance, while invoking the relational strategies of late 20th- century conceptualism. It invites a reading in which the geological temporality of the materials undermines the fleeting, often fraught rituals of human connection. The result is a mise-en-scène of desire and disillusionment at once absurd, tender, and deeply embodied.
Reflect series # Smoke Show, # Blind Spot, # Deep Fake
/Nickel-plated aluminum plates, engraved text, three elements, 60 x 60 x 5 cm each/
This triptych of polished nickel-plated aluminum panels functions simultaneously as mirror surface and semantic device. Each panel bears a centrally engraved phrase, smoke show, blind spot, and deep fake, terms drawn from contemporary language to denote deception, distortion, or concealed complexity. Arranged either in sequence or independently, the panels reflect the viewer with clarity, implicating them directly in the reading. The seductive, mirror-like finish invites visual engagement, while the engraved text quietly destabilizes it, acting as conceptual fissures in the surface. The result is an active tension between appearance and meaning, visibility and omission. Together, these pieces operate as a minimalist lexicon of illusion. They don't define, but rather expose the slipperiness of perception and the instability of truth. In confronting one's own image along these culturally loaded terms, viewer is invited into a space of self-surveillance and critical recognition, where what is seen may not be what is there, and what is there may not want to be seen.
# Soap Box / Bronze cast pedestal, polished, engraved, 60 x 60 x 15 cm/
Soap Box reactivates a historical form of public address, elevated both literally and materially into a minimalist sculpture of cast, polished bronze. Its gleaming surface reflects the viewer while grounding them within a lineage of civic speech. The small central engraving, Soap Box, refers to the improvised platforms once used in London's Hyde Park and beyond, where citizens of all classes would voice their ideas, grievances, and convictions in the open air.
Here, the act of speaking becomes metaphor. This is not a functional stage but a conceptual one. By inviting the viewer to see themselves atop it through reflection rather than amplification, the piece opens a contemplative space around authority, voice, and visibility. In an age where platforms are increasingly digital, privatized, and algorithmically filtered, Soap Box offers a moment of tangible stillness to reconsider the architecture of public discourse.
# Echo Chamber / Bronze cast pedestal, polished, engraved, 60 x 60 x 15 cm/
Cast in polished bronze, Echo Chamber is a sculptural reflection both literal and ideological. Its mirror-like surface offers a seductive encounter with one's own image, to be interrupted by the quiet presence of an engraved phrase at its center: echo chamber. The term, borrowed from contemporary discourse on media and politics, refers to recursive loops of affirmation in which dissent is excluded and distortion amplified. The work operates as both platform and provocation. As the viewer confronts their own likeness in a surface, they are subtly positioned within the very system the piece critiques. What appears reflective becomes reflexive — an object that returns not just an image, but a question: What do we allow ourselves to hear, and with whom do we allow ourselves to engage?
# One Fuck / pedestal, whole white marble block polished, engraved 60 x 60 x 15/
