Mitch Patrick: Etiolated Calligrapher February 13 – March 15 Opening Friday, February 13 with a rece

Mitch Patrick: Etiolated Calligrapher

February 13 – March 15

Opening Friday, February 13 with a reception from 6-8pm

To describe Mitch Patrick’s artistic practice as mediated by technology fails to encapsulate the gravity with which digital interfacing has radically transformed our understanding of internal and external life. Depending on the viewer’s exposure to new printing and coding methods, Patrick’s multimedia approach might range in familiarity as it relates to conventional artistic applications, potentially confusing the prototypical relationship between human creativity and machine-learning production. Inspired by observations of organic shapes, Patrick creates unique symbols or glyphs equally reminiscent of ancient visual languages and contemporary digital codes, incorporated initially into hand-made drawings depicting emaciated humanoid figures amidst mysterious and atemporal landscapes. Encapsulated away from a teeming world outside, the figures are intently focused on an object suggesting the shape of a screen, a tablet, or even a window. The drawings, primarily “written” out in the artist’s conceived typographic glyphs allude to pixels, and the utterances of the artist’s hand at work, where the action of visual consumption is accounted for in each stroke of a calligraphic mark. The title of the exhibition Etiolated Calligrapher similarly references the tendency of plants and other biological entities to gravitate towards light sources, a wry analogy for the vast amount of contemporary experience envisioned through an electronic display. Each drawing is mounted on wooden clipboards reminiscent of clerical work further confounding the outmoded historical distinction between poetic visual mark-making and the presumed sterile monotony of digital coding or technocratic office culture. 

The exhibition is anchored by four suspended prints fabricated by Patrick’s bespoke printing mechanism fashioned from re-assembled 3D-printer parts and generated into square plastic sheeting in a process similar to many types of mainstream consumer production. Patrick hand sews the original digitally printed source-imagery into the composition that have been re-imagined in the artist’s calculated visual language. The content of each work draws from the perspective of the artist’s daily life, but each calligraphic symbol is coded with an indicator of a representational light-value allowing the picture to regenerate through Partick’s asemic glyphic system. 

The film Born in Cold Light is an ongoing video-animation featuring a continuous POV zoom into screens displaying various light sources (light bulbs, sunsets, fire, etc.). Watching in first person, a viewer indefinitely pushes into a source of artificial light depicted on screens. Every frame in the video is rendered entirely in a typeset titled Lodestar, where each glyph is likened to the shape of a star, emphasizing the grandiose negation between the representation of the everyday within the staggering context of historical time. 

While Patrick’s practice promotes an artistic representation through an original digital language, his approach avoids any clear endorsement of the evolving relationship between humans and machines. There are no dystopic representations of a robot-governed future techno-state as often found in science fiction and tech-based artmaking or an endorsement of transhumanist philosophy often popular in emergent tech industries—though the show likely solicits questions about human programmability. Instead, Patrick confronts the gravity of these potentially enormous cultural transformations through an artistic lens, applied with an elegance that might recall the creative engagements with previous monumental historical events, e.g., the advent of the camera or the devastation wrought by modern military machinery. While Patrick utilizes the tools of industrial mechanization, seeing the world through symbols has always been a fundamental part of the human experience, and while his method of perceiving and representing the contemporary world appears to belong specifically to our time, his practice also implores the possibility that the presumed distinction between plants, animals, and machines was never vast or permanent. 

Mitch Patrick (b. 1985 McDonough, GA) is a multimedia artist based on Brooklyn, New York. Patrick received his BFA from University of Montevallo in Alabama in 2007 and his MFA from Brooklyn College in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Tenjinyama Studio in Sapparo, Studio Kura in Itoshima, and Lithium Gallery in Chicago. A two-person exhibition with Ernesto Renda took place at Chart Gallery in New York in 2025. This is his first exhibition with Hyacinth.