PATRICK MICHAEL BALLARD
Artist-in-residence
September 20-October 4, 2020
This season, AUTOMATA is hosting a series of individual artist’s residencies—a program we launched to serve creative process and new work development in the field of puppetry and object performance, while we are unable to gather for events. Each Resident Artist has 24 hour access to the full space, allowing for uninterrupted work-time and focus.
PATRICK MICHAEL BALLARD is the fifth artist in the curremt residency series. Patrick started his residency by culminating his long in-the-works first round of "scene objects" for his newest collaborative theater piece, Fool's Window. While some of these objects have been in the works for multiple years, others were pulled out of the garbage or found under the seat of his car on the way to the space. Patrick is bringing this nuanced, grimy, intricate, and cosmological crew of scene objects together for a work that is a deeply collaborative occult ritual and absurdist community theater all in one.
His collaborators were invited to Automata (one at a time) to interact with his scene objects within theatrical tableaux that he constructed, disinfected, and left for them to engage with. The objects were chosen based on preliminary conversations and the setting of intentions—not unlike pulling cards from tarot or casting rune-laden bones, rolling dice or flipping coins to consult the ancient oracles.
Patrick's collaborators currently include Stephanie Mei Huang, Brian Getnick, Paul Outlaw, Eli Klausner, Melissa Achten Klausner, and Tim Tsang, who Patrick proclaims has become his guardian angel and deadpan psychopomp during his time with Automata. (Tim is also Automata's Creative Technologist,)
From their initial interactions at Automata, a collaboration takes place with Patrick in a remote corner of the world. Thus far those collaborations have involved telepathic messaging sent through the psychonautical vessel receiver of the theater (it wasn’t in the technical manual, but it’s there if you look between the atoms, strings, and spirits), auto-poems generated in response to live feed and relayed as text messages to the performers, and conversations over video chat.
During the rest of his time at Automata, Patrick is focused on documenting these initial rituals and possibilities for the cosmology of objects. All of this will construct an archive of documents and pieces made within the project’s parameters for the sake of this ongoing work, which will nomadically roam like an existential circus on an asteroid belt and aggregate more collaborators and scene objects as he, like an idol-crafting fool in the darkness, casts the sputtering calculations of object oriented nonsense into the hands of others to reveal their collective symbolic order.
Join the live-stream on our FB page HERE at any time between 2-3:30 pm Wednesday September 30.
The 2020 Automata Residency Project is made possible with generous support from The Jim Henson Foundation and the LA Arts Covid-19 Relief Fund, funded by the J.Paul Getty Trust in partnership with the California Community Foundation. Our Residency Projects are also funded, in part, through the ongoing support of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the LA County Arts Commission.
PATRICK MICHAEL BALLARD
Patrick Michael Ballard is a Los Angeles based storyteller utilizing performance, sculpture, creative writing, illustration, installation, and sound to develop the shifting ground of contemporary narrative form. Patrick has exhibited his work at Machine Project, the Les Urbaines Festival in Lausanne, Switzerland, MaRS, 356 Mission, Moskowitz Bayse, ltd, Cirrus Gallery, and has exhibited public sculpture on the facade of the Gamble House. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and his BFA from CSU Long Beach.
Website www.patrickmichaelballard.com/
Instagram :: @patrickmichaelballard