Lyons Wier * Ortt is pleased to present A New Way North, a one-person show of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Patte Loper. For this exhibition, her second solo show in New York, Loper uses painting, drawing and animated video to explore the pictorial and cultural intersection of cinematic history, cold war politics and Antarctic exploration.

While citing specific events and representations of the early and mid twentieth century, Loper makes a wary nod to current events and casts a glance towards the mysterious and unknown. A New Way North looks at the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film, “North by Northwest,” the 1959 signing of the “Antarctic Treaty” (the first arms control agreement of the Cold War, banning military activity on Antarctica and designating it a scientific preserve), Ernest Shackleton’s doomed 1914 expedition across that same territory, and current American military policy as tools to ponder the meanings of connections between narratives (both historical and fictional) and their dramatic settings – such landmarks as New York’s United Nations building, the 20th Century Limited train, Mount Rushmore, and Antarctica. These connections are made particularly foreboding when cast against the ice on both poles currently melting and the Russians recently planting a flag on the arctic floor.

The works in A New Way North are developed through the appropriation and reproduction of images from these events, making what was lost by cultural memory again iconic. Loper subjects these chosen images to an idiosyncratic reproduction process in which things are left out, added, eroded, and exaggerated. This reproduction is followed by the insertion of wildlife (in the form of deer), which intrude upon and interrupt narrative expectations. These metaphoric fissures in logic are what ultimately lead the work towards the mysterious and unknown – an uneasy resolution, but perhaps appropriate one, during a significantly charged scientific and political moment.

Patte Loper received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and currently lives and works in both Boston and Brooklyn. She has shown nationally and internationally, and her work has recently been seen at the College of Santa Fe, Caren Golden Fine Art, The Flat – Massimo Carasi in Milan and at Engholm Engelhorn Galerie, Vienna.