In film installations, performance, and text works, Patrick Staff cites the various ways in which the queer body is embodied, interpreted, and regulated. Their new body of work explores exhaustion and sickness as political states; the fraught spaces where queer desires manifest; and dream-like transgressions of law and order.
Patrick Staff lives and works in Los Angeles. Staff has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2016); Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2015); The Showroom Gallery, London, UK (2014). Group exhibitions have been held at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2014); Maison Populaire, Paris, France (2012); and Whitstable Biennale, UK (2012).
Patrick Staff is on an invited residency in support of their new commissioned work The Prince of Homburg which will premiere at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland in Jun 2019 and at IMMA in Oct 2019. The Prince of Homburg will initiate a dialogue about how history, technology, capitalism and the law have fundamentally transformed the social constitution of our bodies today. Through this work Staff will seek to contest current repressive structures in our society and speculate on alternative ways of moving through the present into a better future.
The Prince of Homburg is co-commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, and IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Ireland. Supported, to date, by Elephant Trust, UK, and Commonwealth & Council Gallery, USA. Video work produced by Spike Film and Video, UK. Special thanks to producer Ali Roche and Humber Street Gallery, UK.