Carrie Paterson

Carrie Paterson is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work is interdisciplinary: object making, performance, drawing, video, research, installation, invention, and text. Paterson has published criticism, fiction, art reviews and catalog essays in a variety of art and culture publications including Flash Art, X-TRA, Art Circles, Shifter and NY Arts Magazine. She teaches at Cal State Fullerton in the art department's graduate studies program and gives undergraduate classes on graphic novels, comics and avatars.

Since 2003 I have been researching the science and discourse informing explorations of outer space. I see my subject matter through a feminist lens. The increasing militarization of space, the neo-colonial quest for extra-planetary resources, and the metaphors that simultaneously code the feminine and outer space as sublime make outer space a location in culture where gender, fiction, and politics are intertwined and codetermined. It interests me as a unique location to represent "crisis," build critical models and stage elements of our subconscious fantasies through phenomenological events and participatory installations. Particularly in focus for me is the collective desperation - as well as libidinous longing - for freedom from the body, materiality and consequence that accompany the 21st century Space Age.