Bio:

Patty Carroll has been known for her use of highly intense, saturated color photographs since the 1970’s. Her recent project, “Anonymous Women,” consists of a four-part series of studio installations made for the camera, addressing women and their complicated relationships with domesticity. By camouflaging the figure in drapery and/or domestic objects, Carroll creates a dark and humorous game of hide-and-seek between her viewers and the Anonymous Woman. The photographs are exhibited in large scale and were published as a monograph in 2017 by Daylight Books, and a monograph of the later work as Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise by Aint-Bad Books in 2020. This series has been exhibited internationally, has won multiple awards, and acknowledged as one of Photolucida’s “Top 50” in 2014 and in 2017. Carroll’s work has been featured in prestigious blogs and international magazines such as the Huffington Post, the BJP in Britain, and NYT LensBlog, as well as exhibited internationally. After teaching photography for many years, Carroll has enthusiastically returned to the studio, delighting viewers with her playful critique of home and excess. Her work is represented by Catherine Couturier Gallery, Houston, TX, Sherry Leedy Gallery, Kansas City, MO, Photo-Eye, Santa Fe, NM, and Weston Gallery, Carmel, CA

Statement:

Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise

My work is about entangling women and home, leading to the phrase “housewife.” All of the narrative still-life photographs are imagined interior spaces of rooms filled with décor and objects, engulfing a lone figure of a woman, camouflaged, often with only bits of her visible. She is both a victim of her obsessions, activities, and circumstances as well as the invisible creator of such; both satisfying and problematic, pathetic and humorous. I create imaginary, humorous worlds in the studio (on a full size “stage” set) that critique and satirize claustrophobic expectations of domestic perfection; an unending but frustrating endeavor. My photographs are metaphors for the interior lives of women; how we substitute everyday objects and artifice and turn them into obsessions. Currently, as we are all confined to our homes during this pandemic, the meaning and overwhelming experience of being “at home” is often humorous yet, sadly dreadful, and felt universally.

www.pattycarroll.com