Art/ Cultural event (2)

2nd March, 2007
Art Lecture: Candidate of Faculty member-- Patrick Kelley

This was my second time to attend art lecture. The first one was Baldessari which is very different from the one that we had with Patrick Kelley. Since I was a few minutes late for the lecture (I’m so sorry about that), I missed the introduction of the artist. When I first got into the lecture room, I didn’t know who he is and what kind of art that he performs. However, I must give credits to his well-organized presentation. The smooth flow and stages of his changes and transformations were clearly shown step by step. I am not going to summary each part of his lecture, but some characteristics of his artworks could be easily extracted.

First of all, I would like to talk a little bit about his background. He was a Biology major, but he dropped it and changed to Art major as he found his interested in it. He started as a photographer, catching natural images around him. Most of the pictures he took are plants, ice, snow, pebbles and wood. His sense of color contrast (mostly black, grey white) impressed me. Even he took some ordinary pebbles or rocks beside the river, can give me a sense of peace and seems conveying messages to audiences.

Throughout the years from his first pick up of art and up until now, I can easily tell his transformation or his focuses on different aspects. The following is the sequence of his change of views:

Framing, space/ scale, link, connection, movement, involvement, sound/audio effect, imagination, and lately computer technology.

His change from capturing still picture to moving objects is interesting and showed linkage between different kinds of art. Although the speaker was a little bit nervous, I appreciate his artworks and his presentation.

Here I found some website related to Patrick Kelley:

This is his official website; you can find most of the information of him or his artwork.


and this one is just a one page description about this artist. You can browse it for more background information of Patrick Kelley.


I guess this one is the most interesting one among all website of the artist. It is about the flipbooks that he created. He also showed some of it in the lecture!