Pattern and Process

Pattern and Process asks how and why patterns help navigate us through our collective and intimate worlds.

Whether we recognize it or not, pattern occurs in all aspects of our lives and affects us in different ways. In using a broad definition of the term—colors, forms, images, or ideas that can be repeated in a serial way—pattern can be decorative, structural, occur in nature, inform and shape our behavior, or act as recurring markers of time. Patterns can provide a set of rules, shape rhythm in music, or even determine our own habits. Organized thematically, the artworks in the exhibition investigate how patterns create—or sometimes challenge—order, systems, and processes; how patterns locate us within the external, physical world, evoking movement, landscape, and time; and how patterns conjure or mine our psychic states or internal worlds, including our memories and emotions.

The exhibition presents works from KAM’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century collection.

Curated by Kathryn Koca Polite, Assistant Curator