Visual Arts alumna Patrice Aphrodite Helmar '15 is in a solo exhibition at The Skirt presented by Ortega y Gasset Projects located in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Helmar’s site-specific installation, Feeling Good About Me, will be in exhibition until April 28, 2019.
Ortega y Gasset Projects is an artist-run curatorial exhibition space and collective and The Skirt is their dedicated space for site-specific installations.
Helmar’s Feeling Good About Me is based on her own experiences growing up in a small frontier community in Alaska where the local bar was a site of belonging and initiation. Her black and white photographs combined with found objects create an installation conjuring up a traditional working-class barroom. The combination of elements “celebrate and question the notion of the local bar as a site of queer safety, revelry, escape, and resistance,” according to the OyG website.
This is Helmar’s second exhibition since graduating from the School of the Arts at Columbia. According to her website, she “is an artist and curator who lives and works in Queens, NY. She has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, and Fordham. Helmar's work has appeared internationally, including at the Jewish Museum, National Museum of Iceland, Gaa Gallery, Paper Machine in New Orleans, Houston Center for Photography, IRL Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Alaska State Museum. In the spring of 2019, Antenna Gallery will publish a portfolio of Helmar’s work made while in residence in New Orleans. In 2016, she founded and continues to curate the Marble Hill Camera and Supper Club. The Camera Club is an ongoing discussion with photographers, and artists using photography in their work modeled after queer family skillshare workshops.
