Elza Kayal Gallery is pleased to announce PAT LAY: Multidimensional, a solo exhibition of works by Pat Lay.

Working since the late 1960s, Lay became an artist in a society that was rapidly embracing and adopting technology. A second machine age, where clear-cut distinctions between body and machine, organic and computational, human and robot, have been probed and increasingly destabilized.

Deeply engaged with the generative effects of technology on the material conditions and modes of human life, Lay creates sculptures, scrolls, collages and prints by using images and objects from the realm of automation as raw materials and motifs to reimagine the world we share with the machines.

Trained as a sculptor and working with clay for decades, Lay juxtaposes computer parts such as aluminum heat sinks and cooler fans with vividly colored, fired-clay objects whose distorted geometric volumes bear bodily connotations.

By uniting the commercially fabricated, metal computer parts that imply gyrating motion with the stillness of the often amusingly erotic clay bodies, Lay animates and reclaims the object world of contemporary technology.

Collage has been a primary device in Lay’s practice since the early 2000s when, after working with multipart structures and assemblages and inspired by the kaleidoscopic composition of Tibetan mandalas, she created her first digital collages. Ten years later, she started working on large-scale, digital and painted collages adopting the vertical scroll format.

Like telescopes, Lay’s scrolls and prints are also time machines. Historically aware and diverse in its references, her work brings into play cultural artifacts, scientific inquiries, and spiritual practices across time and space. A critical commentary about machines as both necessary tools and substitute deities, she proposes new, hybrid taxonomies that address the technologically mediated human experience where souls and bots, motherboards and pictures of the cosmos coexist.

(Excerpted from the essay PAT LAY: Multidimensional by Agnes Berecz)