The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA
On view: September 27, 2019 - 2020
The Mattress Factory is pleased to announce Factory Installed 2019, which will be comprised of eight solo exhibitions by artists from around the world.
Factory Installed 2019 participating artists include Jon Rubin, Tra Bouscaren, Naomi Draper, Nathan Hall, Patte Loper, Pepe Mar, Adam Milner and Patrick Robideau. Each of the eight artists will create new, site - specific installations that are conceived for and executed in the space in which the public views them. Robideau is complete a new piece titled All Is Not Forgotten.
During the installation process, the artists will take part in the Mattress Factory’s residency program. The residency program provides artists with transportation to and from Pittsburgh; housing, per diem and local transportation; all materials and equipment; curatorial support to identify and secure all materials; skilled and unskilled labor during the installation process; documentation and an honorarium.
The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 27, from 6-8 pm and is free and open to the public.
The Mattress Factory is located at 500 Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, PA 15212
Additional photos of the exhibition will be posted shortly.
The Weeks Gallery, Jamestown, NY
October 12 - December 6, 2018
Artist Statement:
My work is informed by my experiences growing up in the declining city of Niagara Falls. Through exploration of abandoned factories and buildings, the idea of the journey and discovery of hidden spaces as a child and as a young man carries into my approach as an artist. This work is intended to be a representation of subdued memories and explorations. Through the careful manipulation of objects and space, I toy with the emotional residue of memory as a space that mixes sentiment, anxiety, and desires into a complex and not easily resolved state.
Press:
Buffalo Spree
Observer Today
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY
March 15, 2013 - May 3, 2013
Physicality and Deception
A key ingredient to Patrick Robideau's artistic practice is the manipulation of the built environment. Sometimes the work is an oversized diorama into which the viewer is intended to peer; sometimes his spaces are passageways that direct the viewer along predetermined paths; and sometimes these built environments operate as sets within which performative actions as staged. His new installation, Hallway, includes some of all these characteristics, as well as stand-alone sculptures incorporated both inside and outside the main work.
Robideau's work is always so thoroughly and impressively constructed it's easy to be distracted by its intense craftsmanship and life-sized scale. Its physicality aggressively asserts itself and whether you are in the work or near it, it evokes a quality of permanence even as we remain aware that it's a temporary and transient display. So much so that Robideau's settings also suggest a suspension of time, as though the thing we know to be temporary has, in fact, been sitting here for ages waiting for us to happen upon it.
Viewers are invited to access Hallway through a centrally-built and darkened passage that moves deeply into the work, turning quickly enough in a couple of directions to create an almost immediate disoriention. It's a sensation likely more pronounced for anyone already familiar with Hallwalls gallery, whose underlying and actual space is almost entirely hidden, as though the work were erasing all possible recollection to any work that had previously been exhibited there. Even more perhaps, it aspires to temporarily erase all notion that a gallery is even here.
This enclosed and directed space concocts its own claustrophobia through its configuration, its material nature, and its controlled lighting. Intimate, with a darkness that requires our eyes to adjust, there is a subtle but pervasive sense that we are exploring, or intruding upon, a personal space that has recently been occupied or may be occupied again soon. While its psychological terrain is expansive, the work creates this effect within a relatively modest physical footprint. Windows and portals are in evidence, but perspective is tightly managed. As if to underscore what we will never know or resolve about the space and the emotions it stirs up, a ceiling balustrade hints at a space above us through its expansive portal, but gives us no more than a tantalizing suggestion of wider possibilities. In the same room, a dimly lit tunnel at floor level suggests something else to discover through a quality that is half lure and half dare. Camouflaged in the nearby corner, an old speaker horn transmits ambiguous bits of old sermonizing, like a looped memory—not specific enough to articulate a narrative, but ever present throughout the close confines of the piece and fuel its anxious atmosphere.
Metaphorically, the physical nature of the installation directly mimics the psychological space concocted by the work—Robideau is often directing viewers into a passage of memory, a terrain of half-remembered dreams whose pull may be strong but which can only be partially accessed. A rabbit hole of the artist's devising, it's not clear that he is inviting us into some dark recess of his own mind. No doubt, some of it is drawn from the personal reservoir of the artist. But it's just as likely that, once immersed in the darkness, we quickly forget about Robideau and wonder what half-forgotten artery of our own mind we have plunged into.
In combination with the larger installation, Robideau also includes architectural models—at different scales and with their own specific interior sight lines—that refer to and play against the larger construction. Models, because they are diminutive representations of that which we know, often contain a quaintly cute aura. Robideau's models are, in their own way, as striking as the larger work that engulfs us. Materially and psychologically, they seem to be appendages of the larger scene, repeating its sightlines, its darkness, and its ambiguity. Standing outside a model, we might presume to encounter greater clarity but Robideau keeps them effectively vague and inaccessible. In playing with various scales, it also becomes a question not merely of what work we are looking at, but what work we might be inside.
Robideau's work toys with the emotional residue of memory as a space that mixes sentiment, anxiety, and desire into a complex and not easily resolved state. Physicality operates in opposition to the more ephemeral qualities to which it alludes, but these opposing impulses also work in tandem. There is a repeated reminder throughout the work that what we presume to be solid and certain is nonetheless a space of tenuous certainty.
-John Massier, Visual Arts Curator at Hallwalls
Press:
Buffalo News
Buffalo Spree
Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY
October 10, 2009 - March 7, 2010
Sculptor Patrick Robideau transformed the Useum into two worlds- the earthy and dark environment above that protects a subterranean underworld where crawl spaces lead to the unexpected. Influenced by science museum environments, PatFarm invited young explorers into a mysterious place of discovery.
Press:
Artvoice
SPACES, Cleveland, OH
April 18 - June 6, 2008
Part of SPACES' 30th Anniversary exhibtion Living in Your Imagination. Curated by William Busta
The work of Patrick Robideau penetrates an intangible ground between history and recollection, the location of an uncertain cauldron within which collective memory is brewed from a variety of ingredients, including who we wish we might have been, who we think we are, and who we hope to be. All-embracing, from sorrow to celebration, this reflective identity informs personal and public decisions.
July 1, 2004 - January 10, 2005
Niagara University's Castellani Art Museum
Patrick Robideau's new installation, Waterfall, presents a thrilling juxtaposition of a mini-falls with traditional "travel" trunks. In decades past, adventurers would load their trunks to the brim with items of importance and necessity for travels to glorious destinations. Today, the trunk has been devalued to a static remnant of times past, its original purpose lost to a culture of mass-produced, disposable objects. A native of Niagara Falls, Robideau can relate these forgotten trunks to his once bustling city of international tourists and travelers, now hoping to dislodge its reputation as a center of lost existence and forgotten memories to one of great future prospects. The artists recurring theme of discovery and transformation of the found object is once again paramount in this large, new installation.
Objects of Desire
What is it about vintage trunks that intrigue us - the romance of travel, of exotic destinations, foreign locations, or th difficult journey of immigration? Wealthy people traveled with elaborate trunks, including upright styles in which clothing was placed on hangers, and hats and jewelry were placed in shelves and drawers. Poor immigrants packed their meager possessions into simpler chests for their voyages to new lands. These carryalls made their way across America in covered wagons, trains, and stagecoaches. Once billed as hand-made, one-of-a-kind wood, canvas, or metal containers, they have evolved into fabric bags with plastic zippers. What once were functional vessels, rich with opportunity have now become passive decorative elements used as corner tabletops or forgotten in a dark attic or basement.The City
Robideau, a native of the city of Niagara Falls, has experienced first-hand the city's transition from that of a teeming, internationally-celebrated destination, to a stagnant center of lost existence and forgotten memories. His image of life in this city, derived from his own background of growing up in Niagara Falls, is one of decay and desertion. Although this trend is not unique to Niagara Falls, it stands out due to the former rich history of the celebrated landmark. The act of actually cutting into and transforming the trunks is a metaphor for Robideau's feeling of entrapment within a city of the past. Travel trunks, once the object of adventure and discovery, are now forced into an arrangement of non-mobility. Niagara Falls is now in an energetic state of growth and rebirth. Although a new era is beginning, Robideau's experience of desertion and decay is a reality not soon forgotten.
Reinterpreting the Falls Through Changed Meaning
A found object or discarded tool left to anonymity in a flea market or thrift shop holds undiscovered beauty and relevance for Robideau - beauty as an ephemeral metaphor for a place in the journey of life, sadly lost on a dusty shelf. For Robideau, these objects are a tribute to the enthusiasm and creativity of manufacturers/craftspeople. They exist now as repositories of memories. Where the found objects, antique travel trunks, meet Robideau's reinterpretation, there is a seamless transition from their old meanings to their new function as parts of a whole. Hopefully, the end result for the viewer will be a new interpretation of the historic significance of and nostalgia for the mighty Niagara Falls.
-Michael J. Beam, Curator of Exhibitions, Castellani Art Museum
PRESS:
Niagara Falls Reporter
University at Buffalo Art Gallery, Center for the Arts
April 26 - September 27 2002
The installation/performance by artists Kurt Von Voetsch and Patrick Robideau, in collaboration with Chris Borkowski and Eric Jackson-Forsberg. Von Voetsch and Robideau have fabricated two interior rooms of a gothic house—a living room and basement room connected by a hole—within the two-story Lightwell Gallery. Reminiscent of a vastly overblown diorama you might see in an antiquated science museum, the structure was visible from the first and second floors of the gallery. Robideau and Von Voetsch say that, for each of them, the work is autobiographical and that the empty spaces elaborated by the installation itself and the performance of Happy’s Nightmare represent aspects of loneliness, desolation and emptiness. Soundtrack by Chris Borkowski.
-Curated by Eric Jackson-Forsberg.
PRESS:
UBNow
Big Orbit Gallery, Buffalo, NY
December 2000
Two sculptors, Patrick Robideau and Kurt Von Voetsch, built a house inside the gallery, which they then covered with black pigment.
