Patte Loper’s Magical Naturalism

Patte Loper has a diverse assortment of work on her website, but her pieces are united by an intersection of naturalist technique and a sense of almost unsettling magic. Many of Patte’s pieces depict animals wandering through abandoned human landscapes, and the viewer is left with a gaping sense of suspension and stillness. In the press release for a 2006 show at Seattle’s Platform gallery, fellow Seattle artist Stephen Lyons wrote: “Patte has investigated what it means to take a fleeting cultural moment, such as a film still or a photo from a magazine article and to slow it down, analyze it, render it carefully, and to ultimately make it her own. The work is a meditation on various forms of expression and the compression and expansion of time.”