Annotations was a series of artist commissions for Drawing Room’s Outset Study. Including 6 artists over a 3-year period, each artist undertook a period of supported residency, researching the library collection to create a work for Outset Study – using the wall, the space, or intervening within the library collection itself.
In his imposing commission for Outset Study, Annotations 4, which echoes the omnipresent construction sites of Elephant and Castle, Patrick Goddard questions ideas of authenticity. The work combines the cynicism of comic books, the melodrama of gothic imagery and the nostalgia of urban documentary photography. The earnestness of ‘hauntological’ concerns (the mourning and longing for an abandoned future – in this case architectural) is offset by more playful depictions of the artist’s role in gentrification, the fetishisation of urban degradation and the desperate middleclass search for authenticity.
Imagery includes white-washed shop windows and derelict urban spaces applied to plywood sheeting through a range of processes including mono-printing. Their scale references the wooden hoardings of building sites, and the comic book style figures on Perspex, cut into the surface of the board, resemble the skateboard stickers that often litter such hoardings.
Following time spent studying in Outset Study, Goddard also references artists found within the library collection – stylistically drawing on the combines of Robert Rauschenberg, the freely-scribbled and graffiti-like works of Cy Twombly and the blackboard drawings of Tacita Dean. Goddard integrates these artistic canons into his work, gently mocking the heavy, historical hand of gestural painting, inherently bound up with the work’s more particular themes.
Patrick Goddard (b. 1984, London) is an artist and writer working in London. Completing an MFA at Goldsmiths University in 2011, he is currently studying for a doctorate at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in Fine Art practice. Recent shows include: Go Professional, Seventeen Gallery, London April-June 2017; Looking for the Ocean Estate,Almanac Projects, London, Nov-Dec 2016, Gone To Croatan, Outpost Gallery, Norwich, May-June 2015; Revolver II, Matt’s Gallery, London, November-December 2014.
ON VIEW: 7th July – 4th November 2018
