Patrick Clancy
Patrick Clancy’s art is centered in the now but is fixed on the future. Rooted in an exploration of dynamic energy systems, it manifests as photographs, text, electronic intermedia projects, interactive installations, and autopoietic computer simulations. He seeks that place in which all things come together: nature and culture, chance and intention, haptic and optic, macro and micro, time and space, information and experience.
It was not until after earning his MFA in painting from Yale that Clancy shifted his focus to electronic technologies. In 1968 he co-founded Pulsa, a pioneering artist collaborative that developed the first voltage-controlled, hybrid, digital/analogue audio synthesizer. In 1969–70 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Spaces, the first major show of installation art in the United States. In 1970–71 he taught at Cal Arts along with Nam June Paik and Allan Kaprow. Today, as chair of the photography and new media department at the Kansas City Art Institute, Clancy offers students a unique historical perspective on new media and a visionary roadmap to its future.
His most recent body of photographic work, Equilibrium and Flow, reveals the dizzying energy of nature that we know instinctively, as we spin in space, stop, and feel the world continue to move in our cells. Or as we race through space, eyes fixed on one point as all else blurs around us. In these moments, we become one with the universal flow. Clancy expresses this flow visually and metaphorically using a hybrid process. Working in a darkroom, he places a negative in the enlarger, then rotates the photographic paper beneath it, in irregular stops and starts, to create a unique analogue print. This image is then scanned by a high-resolution camera to create a digital file, which is laser printed. The effect is mesmerizing and palpable, thanks to the “persistence of vision” phenomenon that allows moving pictures to become
cinematic experiences in our mind’s eye.
Clancy’s Writing Machine is a work in progress that documents the ever-shifting, interdependent flow of natural and cultural information. For example, changes in wind velocity and direction in Banff, Alberta, Canada, trigger corresponding changes in a computerized stack of text files written by Clancy and others. Changes in barometric pressure in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, cause a top page of text to drop to the bottom of the stack, like a repressed memory. When complete, the Writing Machine will exist as a gallery installation, a body of photographs, a video projection, and an exhibition catalogue. It will be an exquisite reminder that every cause has its effect somewhere in the universe. We are all in this together.
—Jan Schall
