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Desirée Patterson's photography finds beauty in climate change
09-03-2023

Desirée Patterson's photography finds beauty in climate change



by Giulia De Sanctis


Desirée Patterson
is a Canadian photographer represented by several art galleries including Whistler Contemporary Gallery. She currently lives in the unrecognized territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Her career began by documenting her extensive travels around the world in which she often observed severely degraded and dilapidated environments. These experiences had a deep impact on Patterson and inspired the themes of her artistic practice: it consists of the acquisition of digital images and its post-manipulation of form, appearance, and orientation, transforming heterogeneous layers into unified compositions.

This creates both industrial landscapes that are seamlessly intertwined with the human figure, as in the series Éveil (2018) in which Patterson wants to connect viewers with their belonging to the natural world, and mountain landscapes that embody the idea of fusion in abstraction as in the series Point de Fusion (2018), with the intention of creating an awareness of Earth's climate change.

Desirée Patterson, Point de Fusion, 2018, courtesy of the artist


Anthropocene; The Present I and Anomaly's series


Desirée Patterson
is an artist and activist aware of the harsh realities the Earth is going through. Amid dire predictions and global disasters, the artist seeks the beauty and grace of the world we live in and spurs collective action.

Her key themes thus include sustainability, environmental issues, social justice, and humanity's dystopian relationship with nature, as in the Anthropocene series; The Present I (2019) which, inspired by the geological time period in which humans have had a major impact on the Earth with the increased use of fossil fuels as an energy source, the industrialization of agriculture, urbanization and finally globalization, the artist depicts industrialized scenes with a highly destructive human presence, foreshadowing the disappearance and decline of the natural world.

Another example is the series Anomaly (2020), which blends glacial photographs with double layers of color, creating warm and cold binary images that highlight both the fragility of Nepal's ice caps and the impending climate crisis coming to the region - the reddish hue present in one-third of each landscape illustrates the extent of glacial loss over the next century -.


Desirée Patterson, Anomaly, 2020, courtesy of the artist


Patterson has also done and does public art projects for the city of Richmond such as the BC Children's Hospital where she created five murals for the new Acute Care Centre depicting local flora and fauna to playfully explore the ecology of British Columbia.





After graduating from language high school, love for art led Giulia De Sanctis (Turin, 1998) to obtain Communication and Enhancement of Artistic Heritage’ degree at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin. She collaborated with art galleries in Turin as an assistant, dealing with the cataloging of the works, the preparation of exhibitions and the press office. She collaborates actively with various magazines and web publications of the art sector.

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