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From book fly:
Camille Patha is a pioneer
Pacific Northwest Surrealist artist who is reconceived as a
proto-feminist and modernist painter in this path-breaking
monograph by distinguished art critic Matthew Kangas. Camille
Patha: Geography of Desire chronicles the 40-year journey of
a woman who addressed significant art trends of the 1960s and
1970s such as hard-edge abstraction and symbolic gender,
transforming them into her own personal vocabulary of shapes and
images--mysterious, delightful and beautiful.
Born in Seattle in 1938,
Camille Patha creates an art of illusion, personal evolution,
social commitment and material exploration that ranges from
hallucinatory landscapes, sexual symbolism, ecological tableaux
and, in her most recent work, gestural responses to the
environment that celebrate the pure materiality of paint.
Working continuously
since her 1965 graduation from the University of Washington
Graduate School of Art, Patha has exhibited widely in galleries
and museums, often challenging existing orthodoxies of style and
content with her deeply personal vision. Too young to be
an Abstract Expressionist, she later adapted her own brushwork
to an array of dynamic, colorful canvases; too young to be a
Surrealist, she developed out of an American variant, West Coast
Surrealism, that became the vehicle for her concerns with
suburban sprawl, endangered species and, overlooked until
recently, sexual imagery that Kangas calls "proto-feminist."
Legendary giant of
American feminist art, Judy Chicago, agrees. Her Foreword
recalls the artist's 1974 encounter with Patha, Chicago's own
responses to the art of the period, and her acknowledgement that
Patha "should be congratulated for having [prevailed]" against
the "privileging of men's aesthetic expressions." Chicago
adds that "Camille and I seemed to be among the few who were
determined that our art school education would not lead to a
dead end... Though she was in Seattle and I was in Los Angeles,
we seem to have faced many of the same challenges."
Kangas examines the
exciting developments of Patha's art in depth: her successful
entries into male-juried exhibitions using initials rather than
her first name; her transition to a long series of successful
and critically acclaimed gallery and museum exhibition; and her
recent return to modernist abstraction, bringing to it her
ambitions of scale, expansive painterly attack, and a
reconsidered philosophy of color and form.
As Chicago and Kangas
demonstrate, the journey within a room of one's own--Patha's
studio in Normandy Park, Washington-- did not occur as a result
of feminist ideology, intellectual coercion or educational
conditioning. Rather, it is the operation of the artist's
mind on a deeply intuitive level as well as an analytical one.
Both have fused deceptively playful scenes with ominously darker
visions of confinement, uncertainty and, ultimately, purely
sensuous optical celebration.
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