Trépanier Baer Gallery in Calgary was recently home to Graeme Patterson's first show in a commercial space, The Puppet Collective. When Patterson's multimedia installation Woodrow was installed for the Montreal Biennial in 2007, Kevin Baer approached the artist and expressed interest in doing a show with him. The Puppet Collective is Patterson's response, and it is an ingenious endeavour for marrying his practice with the commercial side of art making. His stop-action animation films employ similar puppets as their star characters and his interest in the miniature is clearly evident in Woodrow. The less obvious tie with his past work has more to do with narrative. The Puppet Collective uses the puppet and the miniature to continue a theme that was manifest in Woodrow: a consideration of the cycling of history and the circularity of life; in this case the collecting of collectors.

Graeme Patterson, The Puppet Collective 2008, Class photo as reproduced in Canadian Art.

In the opening paragraph of his book Inside the White Cube, Brian O'Doherty talks about the view of earth from a withdrawing spacecraft, a frequent image in sci-fi movies. This scaling-down allows for an alteration in our perspective: "...responses slide from the particular to the general. The individual is replaced by the race...from a certain height people are generally good."[1] Somehow this scaling-down facilitates a removal of threat, and Patterson plays with scale in the fashioning of the fifty-two puppets in The Puppet Collective. The power of the miniature lies in its apparent impotence and it is easy to forget that these seven-inch puppets are based on actual people. If those fifty-two individuals were to come and stand around the walls of the gallery it would have a very different effect. Patterson's figures are approachable and invite an intimate observation. What is more, because these are pose-able dolls, they allow a power imbalance beyond their scale. "Puppetry, according to Scott C. Shershow, finds its roots in 'theological theatre,' where 'player puppets are seen to embody the sovereign intentions of an author-creator.'"[2] While the puppets that the artist employs in his films have an illusionary self-sufficiency, this collective relies entirely on connectedness, on the aspirations and wishes of their maker or potential future owner.[3]

Patterson's use of the puppet and the miniature is a considered strategy, a way to allow for a subjectivity twice removed. The viewer of Woodrow does not have an immediate sense that this work is about their own personal experience, but the artist surfaces a consideration that is universal, extending beyond the small prairie town. Woodrow is about collective memory, the passage of time and life's circularity.[4] It is a recreation in miniature of the town where the artist's grandfather lived for the entirety of his life. Within some of the buildings are screenings of his stop-action animation films. Patterson creates yet smaller versions of his miniatures and places them within the miniature of his grandfather's workshop, "...creating a layered mirror-like circularity that suspends reality."[5] He also uses the buildings he has recreated as props within his films, further reinforcing this circularity. The overall effect is unsettling: a double mirror whereby the viewer sees back into the past and forward into the future in one glance.[6]

Patterson carries this same circularity into The Puppet Collective. The original fifty-two puppets are a collection of random individuals constructed from memory, people the artist encountered over the past year, one per week. They line the gallery walls in Barbie-type boxes constructed from wood and Plexiglas (pronouncing themselves quite clearly as commodities), and are documented in the form of a class photo that was unfortunately missing from the gallery show. Patterson replaces each of these original puppets as they are purchased with a new puppet of the purchaser, creating a new, less random collective of fifty-two art collectors from across Canada. The purchaser becomes commodity; the collector becomes collected; repeating the circular structure of Woodrow. While this has an element of lighthearted slapstick humour, within the joke lays a power shift that has something to say about the business of art. In his article, "Collecting-So Normal, So Paradoxical," Matthias Winzen writes: "in a way, all collecting can be seen as an ongoing attempt to cope with the fact that time goes by."[7] He believes that the collection acts "...as a lasting mirror of the person who built it."[8] Collecting then is a means to create an immortal reflection of the self, and collectors have been known to have their own likeness painted or sculpted as the masterpiece. In The Puppet Collective Patterson is reviving this practice, he is playing to the collector's desire to be recognized, noticed and remembered. Yet, Winzen warns of paradoxes in collecting, one of which is of particular interest here: "similar dissimilarity."[9] In essence, when individual, unique things are brought together in a collection, they become part of a group; they lose whatever it was that made them unique. So, does the collector run the risk of being typecast as a part of this collective? In being miniaturized in the form of a puppet, and ultimately, possibly part of someone else's collection, the collector forfeits some of their own control. This is not unlike the dynamic that exists for the artist when they sell their work in a commercial venue. Woodrow has been described as "...ironic, humorous, slapstick, and irreverent."[10] The Puppet Collective similarly employs playful devices to draw attention to the complex relationship between artist and collector. Here again Patterson creates the effect of a double mirror, the experience of the artist and the collector reflecting one upon the other.  

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[1] O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube. The Lapis Press, San Francisco: 1986, p. 13.
[2] Halkes,Petra. Parachute. "Phantom Strings and Airless Breaths. The Puppet in Modern and Postmodern Art". 92(1998), p. 14.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ring, Dan. Woodrow: A Multimedia Installation by Graeme Patterson. Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Mendel Art Gallery: 2006, p. 10.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid. p. 14.
[7] Winzen, Matthias. Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art. Prestel, Munich and New York: 1998, p. 22.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid. p. 23.
[10] Ring, Dan. p.14.