McLennon Pen Co. Gallery is thrilled to announce Patrick Quinn as the gallery’s first Artist-in-Residence. He will be living and working this summer for the month of August at the gallery in Austin, Texas. The residency will culminate in an exhibition of airbrush paintings made exclusively during the duration of his stay.
Each painting Quinn makes informs the next one. He describes his succession of paintings as memes in a different format, a long-form version, an exercise in how we process images and a “cool space” to spend time with silly, stupid, and absurd contemporary thoughts. These ideas spring up from looking online and scrolling his phone, often browsing Instagram and Google’s Image Search on Page 1 until a photograph is discovered that would “look so good in airbrush.” He thinks of it as a form of printing the internet, freezing the ephemeral like pinning a wave upon the sand. A lot of the images have personal references for him or inside jokes, and are in this way an autobiographical record.
In Quinn’s show earlier this year in New York at WHAAM! gallery, the paintings focused on the single subject of oysters and their history within the US. He uses this recent painting series as an example of his usual process, saying it was a setup and a punchline, a simple direct concept or premise that communicated clearly what the central idea was– nothing cryptic, or literal, just something obvious.
The artist describes the two most recent paintings made during the residency, as if reciting a poem–
the frog was heroin and now is a frog
the cat was toothpaste and now is a cat
Quinn tends to chase his own tail in these types of circles and goes down rabbit holes, popping back up occasionally for air and avoiding making imagery with too clear a narrative. It is a fine line between going deep into a concept and being able to come back out, but airbrushing and utilizing a projector helps make this process of layering and splicing more efficient.
The artist initially had avoided airbrushing when a group of artists in his circle first started using the medium around 2011 to 2013 and began popularizing a style that appeared digital but in fact wasn’t. He was trend averse and more focused on oil painting and ceramics at the time, but did also occasionally dabble with graffiti tagging. It wasn't until he had the means to buy a projector around 2016 with his “weed money” that he started to submit to airbrushing as unavoidable and irresistible with its commercial aesthetic and cost effective pricing. One of the first airbrush paintings he made was of an outlet full of plugs with a surge projector also jam-packed with plugs. When he posted an image of the painting on Instagram he received hundreds of likes and encouragement to keep going this direction.
When the residency ends, the paintings showcased in the exhibition and their meme concepts will get to have a life in the real world rather than on a screen for a change, a different and longer life span with people interacting with the paintings in a physical space. Quinn jokes though that the paintings do inadvertently always wind up back on the internet in the end.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Patrick Quinn (born 1988 in Virginia, USA) is a visiting artist who currently resides in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. During a period from 2011 to 2018 the artist lived in Detroit, Michigan, and was one of four founding members of the ceramics collective Hamtramck Ceramck. His most recent solo exhibition was Just Say Your Busy at WHAAM! gallery in January 2023 in NYC. Notable collaborations within pop culture include Quinn making a painting to be used as the album cover for Lil Ugly Mane’s rap album Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern from 2021, as well as painting a lightning backdrop for rapper Bad Bunny’s recent photoshoot for the July 2023 issue of Rolling Stone.
