the ski club

Jehra Patrick is an artist, curator, and program producer, who works out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Central to Jehra’s practice is the interest in the structures that support artists and their work and she often takes these functions — display, distribution, and documentation — as subjects for new works. Past bodies of work include paintings, photographic collages and remastered prints of archival records; hypothetical exhibition fixtures; and, in recent years, exhibition-making and art spaces as form have served as an extension of her studio practice. Her interests lie in administration-as-expressive-form and the relationships that art production has with various “art world” functions. Currently, she’s most excited by merging these subjects and forms with everyday, modest and personal activities like self-care, shopping, and homemaking, to understand a broader economy of desire. 

 

In Stilleven, Patrick brings together a suite of covetable objects merging forms of desire: career advancement and measures for artistic success; building a home and a family; philosophical preoccupations with Painting and its history; consumer hang-ups and instant gratification; the escapist seduction of vacations; and the comfort, discomfort, and balance between. “Stilleven” is the Dutch word for “still life,” or to bring the motionless to life. In other etymologies, still life describes “dead nature” or “nature mort". My own etymology suggests the adverb use, still even is a valuation for “balanced up to now,” and also leveling off or flatness. 

Jehra is a 2017 recipient of the International Research Program grant from the Danish Art Foundation, a 2016 recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge and the Jerome Travel and Study Grant for Digital Producers, a 2015 and 2013 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, a 2013 recipient of the McKnight Next Step Fund, and a 2011 recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists. She has had recent exhibitions at the Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia), Yeah Maybe (Minneapolis), The Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), The DeVos Museum of Art, (Marquette, MI), Ridgewater College (Hutchinson and Willmar, MN), Harcourt House Artist Run Centre (Edmonton, AB), and Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN).