Promiscuous Patterns: The Pleasure Overload Effect

Prepare yourself for an evening of visual pattern pleasure. Inspired by the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, this program presents films, videos, and hybrid forms of computer and net art that embrace of what curator Anna Katz refers to as “promiscuous patterns.” Spanning the late 1960s to present, the works selected by Los Angeles–based artist Jennifer West—including Lis Rhodes’s seminal Dresden Dynamo (1971) emphasize visual pleasure and take an inventive approach to materiality, from painting, drawing, sewing, stenciling, and collaging directly on filmstrips to creating animation and computer-generated patterns. Sharing impulses with the Pattern and Decoration movement, they draw on techniques and motifs used in crafts, textiles, ornamentation, and other forms of “low art,” translating these to film or technology. West, an associate professor of the Practice of Fine Art at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, will introduce the program.