“All try their hands at miming, at repeating, and at re-creating the reality that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of our truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd.
… A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.”

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The paintings of Pat Perry are remarkable: beautifully rendered, with a Bruegelesque attention to landscape detail and generosity towards human foibles. They portray a joyful dreadful strangeness that’s somehow not at all strange in the context of the American landscape: in-between places and in-between times and the in-between people who inhabit them. People who are between coasts, between cities, between ideologies, operating to some gleefully mad logic of their own, in a world separate from the cynicism of people who would pretend to speak for them or pretend to understand them.

But these people are working on something, they’re building something that defies understanding. In rusts and greys, the vast spaces of burnished grass and gloomy sky are weighed down by small clusters of human clutter. And by people operating on a singularly American level of absurdity to respond to the lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert. With perfect American make-do, use-what-you-can eccentricity, their recitals and contraptions question our parables, our rituals, our conventions, and our values, in a celebration of beautiful and wildly mysterious meaninglessness. They’re telling us something important, but we don’t need to understand it to find truth in it. They’re presenting a performance that doesn’t need an audience, and they’re creating a refuge to share the great loneliness we all share.

There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.

Perry’s sketchbook drawings form an in-between place themselves, a halfway house between the things he’s seen and the scenes he’ll paint. We learn about the places he’s been and the places he’ll go; the things he’s read and the ideas he’ll explore. He talks about memories, anticipation, and time passing.

“I won’t be living here much longer. In a few days leaving America for almost two months. But one day I’ll be old and remember the months of living in the factory between the train tracks and the river. In the oldest, dirtiest best part of Grand Rapids. Amidst neurotic anxiety, the nighttime thunderstorms out huge windows, the empty parking lot, the nights on the roof, and too much time alone. It’s falling apart. The Black Hills neighborhood. Being hidden in a secret place that people only know if someone brought them here. … The flags that hang from the window of the third floor, the smokestack, and dusk that made the sky blue in a way that only happens sometimes. These are the parts I’d like to remember. The isolated parts will fade away, they usually do.”

Pat Perry (b. Michigan, 1991) is an American artist primarily painting, drawing, photographing, and implementing large-scale outdoor murals around the world.

Many of Pat’s projects have supported various social causes including cooperative projects with the Beehive Design Collective, AptArts, the UN Commissioner For Refugees, and No More Deaths. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Hashimoto Contemporary NYC, Takashi Murakami’s Hidari Zingaro Gallery in Tokyo, and a museum show at UICA in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Pat lives and works in Detroit. See more of his work on his website, and on Instagram at Heypatyeah.